Photothru.com Reviewer's Comments
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Photothru.com is an adequate digital photo printing service that's fairly easy to use, offers quick turnaround times and produces prints that are really pretty good. But Photothru.com's pricing, total lack of additional services and a glitch in their ordering system kept us from giving it any higher ranking.
Ease of Use - Ordering Process:
We found uploading digital photos to Photothru.com really very simple. The service's order process was also pretty easy, except that the program automatically assumes you want two prints of each photo. Although we checked the box to only select one print for each photo we ordered, Photothru's system still put two prints for each photo into our shopping cart. When it came down to it, we couldn't figure out how to change it to only one print—this is a major glitch within this site.
Quality of Prints:
We sent the exact same digital photos to each of the online digital photo printing services we reviewed; we did so to get the most consistent measurement of quality possible. The prints we received back from Photothru.com were consistently lighter than our original digital pictures, see comments below:
Below are the original photos. Click to Enlarge
Below are the prints developed by Photothru.com. Click to Enlarge
- People Inside: As compared to the original, the colors in this print turned out a bit brighter and lighter.
- Building Outside: We found this print to be brighter and lighter in contrast to the original picture. Although some may feel this was an improvement, we were looking for exact duplication of the original.
- People Outside: Similar to the other outside picture we submitted to Photothru.com, this print was both brighter and lighter than the original.
Note: To check quality, we took each set of prints received from the online photo developer and laid them down, side-by-side for comparison.
Pricing:
Photothru.com's pricing seems to be inexpensive on larger prints, but more expensive for the more common, smaller-sized prints.
Also, although this service doesn't offer as many choices of larger-sized prints as other online photo services, they do have one of the most extensive lists of smaller-sized print options around.
Service and Site Features:
Photothru.com offers free online storage of your album that your friends or family members can access to view your photos and then order prints themselves; this is the extent of the extras offered by this service.
Shipping Costs/ Turn Around Time:
To ship five 4 x 6 inch prints, Photothru.com charged us $ 1.98. The actual postage for USPS First Class for this shipment was $.83, leaving $1.15 for packaging and handling costs. Being charged this amount for shipping is not uncommon in the world of online photo developing, but there are services that charge much less.
Our prints came in a lightweight, cardboard sleeve, reinforced by a rigid, cardboard insert, which was then placed inside a paper envelope.
:
We gave each photo developing service anywhere from 1 to 4 days to process our order and have our prints in our hands; Photothru.com met this requirement.
Summary:
Photothru.com is a no-frills service with very few extras and one of the most generous selections of small print sizes we've seen. By fixing the glitch in their ordering system, this service could improve their ranking status greately.
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