Introduction
As the standard platform for personal photography makes the transition from film to digital, the issue of an acceptable method of digital image printing has been a prevalent one. From personal photo printing devices, to high end digital image printing services, there is a large range of both price and quality when choosing a method of image printing. Evaluating the quality of the various printing services is one that has been undertaken by many, but mostly in a very qualitative manner. These evaluation methods often involve a person looking at printed photos from different services and offering a subjective opinion on which one is better. Although these evaluations can be valuable measures, it is possible, and perhaps more telling, to quantitatively measure certain limitations of the different printing services.
Our project was designed to measure quantitatively a handful of these printing limitations, and to do so with three low cost digital printing services. Many of the published photo printing evaluations were carried out on online services such as Shutterfly and O-foto. In an attempt to provide some original and valuable information we chose three services that seemed to have a lack of published evaluation data, but that were also highly used services: Wal-Mart, Costco, and Fotki.