Where to get reliable digital prints?

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BronwenWeeGo.jpgI’m starting to wonder if there’s anywhere that can reliably print a decent representation of digital photos.

It seems to be a bit hit and miss getting them printed.  When i first started printing photos I used to get them printed online.  I soon stopped this when the photos came back bent, chopped off, bad colour etc.  When you print them online there’s no-one to complain to.

Last year I got a photo printed on canvas.  It was printed sooo dark you couldn’t make out the mountain, it was just this big black blotch.  It took me about 2 months of constant phone calls to get my money back.  They blamed the photo and said it was too dark.  I’d looked at it on at least a dozen monitors and printed it in 6×4’s and all were fine.

In my latest drama, I took a whole pile of photos at a wedding.  Spent all morning colour correcting, and cropping how i liked in 6×4 aspect ratio.  Took them into a staore, ordered 250 photos, went back and picked them up, got home and realised EVERY photo had 1 cm cut off the top and side, which mean in some photos tops of ppls heads were cut off or very close to the top of the photo. 

Went all the way back, trying to explain that no…i’d saved them as 6×4 so they should print that way and that they’d looked fine on their kiosk.  They looked at it on the kiosk and it looked fine, tried printing one of the photos with the same result.  They gave us our money back, which is pretty much all they could do…but I just find it a bit disturbing they had no idea there machine was printing incorrectly, and that it would continue to do so.

Their suggestion was try again another day or in 6 mths when they get a new machine, or print them somewhere else.

So this meant that we didn’t have time to print them somewhee else before people went home which is very sad 🙁

Since then, I’ve read a lot of reviews and everywhere seems to have the same problems..even the “camera stores” seem to do randomly bad print jobs and not care.

So anyone got a reliable digital print house?