Computer Shopper Blog: Fade to grey

Thursday, 3 December 2009

Fade to grey

When it comes to photo durability and light-fastness, we found that a home photo printer is a better bet than online or high street photo printing services.

Last year, we carried out a comparative test of nine high street and online photo printing services, alongside our favourite photo printer at the time, Epson's Stylus Photo R360. HP's SnapFish online printing service was the clear winner in our blind quality tests, while Kodak's Gallery produced excellent colour prints and Jessops JPics produced the best black and white prints. The R360 didn't score too well, although its picture quality was nonetheless good enough to frame and display.

We put copies of the same photo from each service or printer up in our office window on the 20^th of October 2008. We made sure that only half of each photo was exposed to the light, to give you some idea of how they'd compare to the same photos stored out of the sun. The photos have been exposed to air and direct sunlight for 409 days – that's a little under 14 months. We were astonished by the results, which you can see below.

The Stylus Photo R360 is no longer in production, but all the printers in Epson's current Stylus Photo printers use the same Claria inks which, in combination with Epson's own-brand Premium Glossy photo paper (used in our original test), will produce comparable levels of light-fastness. None of the printing services could equal the light-fastness of the R360, but Photobox and Snapfish faded evenly, without major colour changes, which makes them the least poor of the service prints.

Here are the photos in their pristine and faded forms. Please ignore any red marks on the images - these are caused by rub-off from the magic marker we used label the photos.