Poster Printing

recently we printed a poster (20x30) of a hike we did this summer. put a bunch of pictures on either side of a topo map overlaid with an aerial photo with our gps tracked route on top. uhh lets see i can figure out how to put a thumbnail of it up...


so we went shopping online for a printer. in the past i have used ofoto.com which is now kodakgallery.com . for my little prints have been using costco because i can upload and then go pick them up at the store the next day. so that is where i looked primarily.
costco offers 20x30 poster prints for $10. kodakgallery for $20. so we went with costco. costco subcontracts with snapfish for the posters.

personally i find the snapfish site less than ideal in usage and in looking for information on it. finally i via e-mail i found out that there is a 10meg limit on the size of the file. so we compressed our file a little bit from 34meg to get it uploaded, both files were 20x30 at 300 dpi. it still looked pretty good though not quite as good. but for half the price we figured we could swallow that.

when we got the poster we decided that maybe $10 was too cheap to pay for a good poster print. they had resampled the picture to 100 dpi! so we ordered from kodakgallery and got a good print of our poster. below is a picture showing the differences between the snapfish/costco (left) and kodakgallery (right). each pair was taken in the same picture (so the lighting etc is the same) and i just cropped off the extra stuff for easier comparison. the top two are to compare the colors (snapfish apparently decided the picture needed to be 'warmer' and in kodakgallery i was able to select that they not crop the picture or mess up its colors) and the bottom two are to compare the resolution.