Snappy Snaps review

Snappy Snaps stores a feature of most high streets, providing a range of services that rivals many online retailers, from standard 6x4in photos to huge poster enlargements, massive canvas prints and novelty items. Each store is run by its own franchisee, which means there’s some variance, but in terms of speed and convenience, they’re hard to rival.

Different shops provide various services for getting your photos to them. Our local branch, on Charlotte Street in London, provides a convenient Java upload interface and sends emails with information of your order’s status. Other branches allow you to send photos by email or FTP upload, and of course, you can always take your memory card to the shop to have the photo developed.

You can order your prints online if you want, and then pop in to pick them up at your convenience

We opted to upload our photos over the web. Although Snappy Snaps promises that your prints will be ready within 24 hours, we were astonished to find that just 12 minutes after we received an email confirming our order we got a second mail telling us that our prints were ready to pick up.

This graph totals our blind test scores from all the prints in a stacked bar graph, so you can see which service did best overall and where their individual strengths lie – click to enlarge

Not only did Snappy Snaps prove to be prompt, but our entire rating team was consistently impressed by the quality of the company’s prints in our blind tests. Snappy Snaps was the only commercial photo printer that put up a serious challenge to our home photo printer, and in some cases exceeded it, particularly on our print of green and gold fields beneath a cloudy sky. The colours were natural and the image detailed without the excessive sharpness of the inkjet. Snappy Snaps produce detailed, fine-quality and naturally coloured prints of all our subjects, including the ever-challenging test of pale skin tones.

Here’s our natural skin tones test, scanned from the actual print – click to enlarge

However, quality comes at a price. Snappy Snaps is the most expensive photo printing service we’ve reviewed by a long shot. If you order between 11 and 50 6x4in prints, each will cost you 36p. As with most printing services, there are discounts available for larger orders. Poster-sized enlargements are also more expensive than anything you’ll find on the web. However, the sheer speed and quality of printing makes Snappy Snaps the best printing service for anyone who needs prints in a hurry.