Reviews: Online Print Services

Fotango

http://www.fotango.com

Delivery Time

Fotango were the joint-second fastest print service during this test. I placed my order at 4.30pm on 29th July and received the prints on 31st July. A 2-day turnaround is excellent, but not quite as good as PhotoBox.

Packaging

The prints from Fotango came packaged in a fairly sturdy cardboard envelope, which was then inside a normal paper envelope for delivery. I'm not sure if the overall package, however, would prevent your postman from attempting to force it through your letterbox if it was too big to fit through.

Price

Price per 6x4 print: £0.49

Nearly 50p per 6x4 print isn't very economical and maybe out of the price range of most people. After all, getting 36 prints done would cost a whopping £18!

Points to Note

A nice feature was the Cropping Options box, which allows you to select exactly how your photos will be cropped.

Not so good was the fact that you have to register as a Fotango user in order to find out what their prices are. I probably wouldn't have bothered registering if I was just an ordinary customer.

Print Quality

Here are the 4 prints that I received from Fotango, scanned on my Black Widow 4830 Pro flatbed scanner at 72 dpi:

The prints from Fotango used Agfa Prestige Digital paper. They had the look and feel of "traditional" photographic prints.

I thought the prints were lighter than the images that I could see onscreen, although it must be noted that I didn't calibrate my monitor for each print service.

When compared with the prints from the other services on test, I felt that Fotango's prints were lighter and yellower (not a good thing). You can clearly see this by looking at the grass in Print 3, which looks as though it hasn't seen any rain for weeks, rather than being a vibrant green colour. Also skin tones looked a little sickly and unnatural.

I suspect that this yellowing effect is caused by the paper type used by Fotango. There was one other print service on test that also used Agfa Prestige Digital paper, and their prints also had the same yellow cast. In isolation, the Fotango prints didn't look too bad, but they suffered when looked at alongside the prints from the other print services.

The cropping of the images was OK, with not too much detail being lost at the edge of the images. Each print was perfectly cut with no rough edges.

Overall Rating

Apart from the quick delivery time, there aren't too many reasons to recommend using Fotango. Print quality was one of the poorest on test, packaging was merely average and the price per print is pretty high for what you get.

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