Jessops Photo Printing review

The Jessops chain of photography shops is a mainstay of the British high street and provides photo printing both in-store and online. The online service is provided by German online photo-printing giant CeWe. Fortunately, all photos are printed in a centre in the UK, so you won’t have to wait too long to get your prints. You can have them delivered by post for £1.49 or dispatched for collection free of charge at any branch of Jessops. Unfortunately, costs have gone up since our last review. If you order 30 6x4in prints, you’ll pay 19p each, while 7x5in prints cost 26p apiece. Prices drop considerably if you order more than 50 prints, though, reducing 6x4in photos to 12p each. Jessops accepts PayPal as well as standard credit and debit cards.

Jessops provides a particularly glossy looking Java (or ActiveX for Internet Explorer) browser, which makes it easy to preview and upload the quality of JPEG and TIFF files. However, we were disappointed to find that it no longer offers simple single-file and zip file uploads. Jessops’ downloadable photo-ordering utility is excellent and, unusually, is available for Mac OS X and Linux as well as Windows. It took a surprisingly long time to for the program’s auto-downloader to install the utility from the internet, but it was worth the wait. It detected photos that had already been edited and also suggested that we disable the automatic image correction that is enabled by default. It also picked out photos that it suggested should have red-eye removal applied to them. You can also use the utility to print photos directly from your Flickr account.

Opinion about the quality of the Jessops prints was divided among our blind-test panel. We noticed a faint yellowish tint to many of the pictures that gave a pleasingly warm effect to daylight shots but also made pale skin tones look faintly orange. Black and white prints were well shaded but again looked faintly sepia-tinted when compared to other black and white prints. Our photos were sharp and clear but our blind test panel felt that colour accuracy wasn’t as good as most of Jessops’ rivals, making it a relatively poor choice if you’re a perfectionist. A test shot faired rather badly in our photo fade test, taking on a distinct magenta tint after four months’ exposure to sunlight.

Jessops’ online service provides good, if not astonishing, prints; prompt delivery and some excellent tools for uploading photos. However, it’s surprisingly expensive compared to most similar services, and we’ve seen better colour accuracy from others. We prefer Bonusprint.