Wal-Mart Reviewer's Comments

Wal-Mart's an online photo developing service is easy to use, offers great pricing and adds a special level of convenience. Unfortunately, we were not that impressed with their quality of prints.

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Ease of Use - Ordering Process:  

Wal-Mart is easy to order from, but a bit confusing when it comes to the type of prints you can order. For example, it you order prints online to be delivered to your home or to a store, the prints come in a glossy finish and costs 12 cents, but matte finish is only available through the one-hour service and costs more.

Quality of Prints:  

To test for quality, we sent the same digital photos to all of the online photo developers we reviewed.

• Sunset: . Many services we reviewed were able to enhance the color of our sunset and our models. The print from Wal-Mart was very dark.
• Black and White: This photograph is very red. Next to the other prints this image almost had a rust color tint.
• Aerial: This was the best picture of the bunch. However, the photograph still seemed washed out.

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:  

Usually a low-price leader, Wal-Mart's photo printing service prices were very competitive compared to the other services we reviewed. Although their standard 4 x 6 prints were not the cheapest, they had better prices than most for larger prints like 5 x 7 and 8 x 10. This is especially true if you use their in-store delivery, which does not charge for shipping, but the per-print cost is more.

Service and Site Features:  

We found that one of Wal-Mart’s best assets is their photo organizer download. With this additional application you can manage you photographs on your hard drive without any worries of deletion. However, if you choose to solely use Wal-Mart’s online services albums will be deleted after one year of inactivity. Which means you have to buy at least one print, once a year.

Wal-Mart offers a huge selection of personalized gift options including aprons, keychains, magnets, mugs, playing cards, t-shirts and more. And most are the same price for in-store and home delivery.

They also offer a mobile device option which allows you to upload the photographs from your cell phone or PDA and they will print them.

Shipping Costs/ Turn Around Time:  

Wal-Mart's costs to ship us four 4 x 6 inch prints was $1.14. As the actual postage for USPS First Class to ship to us was $ .99, this means it cost Wal-Mart $.15 to ship us our photographs. That worked out great for us. Also, if you have your prints delivered to your local store shipping is free.

This service shipped our prints in a paper sleeve, which is then placed inside a lightweight cardboard envelope. You can also save your shipping costs by arranging to pick up your prints from your local Wal-Mart store.

Our photos arrived in a lightweight cardboard envelope with a standard paper photo folder inside. We received our pictures in perfect shape.

Each photo printing service we reviewed was given 1 to 6 business days, from the time we ordered them to get our prints back to us. Wal-Mart’s photos arrived within that time frame.

Summary:  

We were impressed that a company that is so diversified, with so many different products and services; however, photographs are only as good as the person developing them and obviously Wal-Mart needs to do some farther training.