I can't comment on Costco's acrylic but I just got a couple printed through Bay Photo on metallic paper and the results are spectacular, I'm really impressed.
I've done a few canvases and an aluminum print through Costco and found the lower price was reflected in the quality.
canada_guy wrote:
I can't comment on Costco's acrylic but I just got a couple printed through Bay Photo on metallic paper and the results are spectacular, I'm really impressed.
I've done a few canvases and an aluminum print through Costco and found the lower price was reflected in the quality.
I've had hit and miss results with Costco. I've since been printing my own, but for acrylic I've sent out a test image to https://www.pictorem.com/
Awaiting the test image to see how well they do acrylic.
As a side note, I had a bad experience with B&W metallic prints from Bay Photo. Twice the prints came back with a noticeable green cast.
chez wrote:
I've had hit and miss results with Costco. I've since been printing my own, but for acrylic I've sent out a test image to https://www.pictorem.com/
Awaiting the test image to see how well they do acrylic.
As a side note, I had a bad experience with B&W metallic prints from Bay Photo. Twice the prints came back with a noticeable green cast.
The price isn't a crazy amount more than Costco - I'm looking forward to hearing how it turns out. What size and thickness did you go with?
beavens wrote:
The price isn't a crazy amount more than Costco - I'm looking forward to hearing how it turns out. What size and thickness did you go with?
Jeff
I just got a small print to see how the quality and colours pan out. I have plans for a 54" x 42" acrylic print of the tree during sunrise that my son and daughter-in-law were married under as a gift for their new house.
chez wrote:
I just got a small print to see how the quality and colours pan out. I have plans for a 54" x 42" acrylic print of the tree during sunrise that my son and daughter-in-law were married under as a gift for their new house.
Test print should be in next week.
Nice - please post here or PM how they did. Wow, great present!!
I gave up home printing 2 years ago and started from scratch researching labs. I was surprised how many roads led to Costco. So, I tried my local store, got good results on a variety of prints, and have been very satisfied ever since. I've never had a re-do and I'm picky. But a few things showed up in research. First, not all Costcos are created equal. Most are OK, but a few turned up with lots of bad reviews. So, you gotta test yours.
Second, not all Costcos are consistent. The machines are fairly idiot proof and are fully automated, even telling the operators when maintenance is needed. But in most locations, only 1 employee (the manager) is trained to do the maintenance. So, if that person is off duty for a long weekend, the staff will continue cranking out prints with maintenance alarms going off.
Third, Costco is (was in 2019) closing some photo centers. That really means consolidation. Your store may still take orders and offer local pickup, but the actual printing may be done elsewhere and shipped in. Not a big problem, just slower service.
"Do they require the image to be a certain file type and color profile (hopefully not sRGB)?"
It's been a while since I printed at Costco but when I did I worked with my local (Culver City, Ca.) store and with the manager there and was able to have them print out a profile target with all of their normal auto color management features turned off. I made the profiles and had about 300 hundred prints, again, having them turn off the auto correction stuff and print the files I had supplied that were pre-converted to that profile. The prints were perfect. They had never had anyone make their own profiles but were surprisingly willing to play along, and my clients were thrilled because the cost was so much less than if I had made them myself.
sRGB is NOT going to be an issue for those printers as the gamut of the paper they use combined with the machine calibration and chemistry yields an approximate match to sRGB anyway. Not exactly the same but pretty darned close. They used to request sRGB but I don't know if they still do. The machines don't require it but that also depends on how they're set up, preference wise. And, you'd be surprised at just how colorful and saturated a print from an sRGB file can be. On some inkjet printers with the right paper AND the right image you can see a very small difference but on most images it's not enough to worry about. In fact, during one of these stupid sRGB vs. wider gamut discussion several years ago, I made a series of about twenty or so 24"x36" prints for a fellow FM member (at my expense) just to show how little difference there was. The reason there were so many prints was that we were not only showing the effects of color space gamut but also a sets of prints with progressively higher amounts of jpeg compression, and printing prints that large would show degradation much better than smaller prints. The very surprising result for me was that even a #4 level jpeg looked more than fine at that size print but a #2 was not, showing large amount of visual artifacts. Since most of us send at least #8 or #10 quality compression when uploading files for prints, jpeg is not a real issue either.
And, yes, back then I would have used the Chromix ColorThink app to compare paper profile gamuts. sRGB is not something I would worry about.
I don't print with the sRGB profile nor do I use jpegs as a file for prints. And those using said combo would not get my business. That's me.
And yes, I print my own work and have been doing so for quite some years now. Starting with an Epson 2200, currently using a 3880. That said for prints larger than 17 x 22 inches, I'd use a company that accepts tiff files saved in the Adobe RGB (or ProPhoto) color profile.
And yes, consumer printers (ex: Epson's 3880) are capable of printing beyond the shallow sRGB color space. This provides a more vibrant (saturated) image vs. one that's printed in the sRGB color space.
Would love to hear of anyone’s experience with someone on the East Coast.
I’ve been following these kinds of discussions and have heard two so far:
Bumblejax (Seattle)
And this one Impact Visual Arts (San Diego)
