Photobox review

Photobox is one of the biggest and most popular online photo printing services, and was one of the first to offer a wide range of novelty items and build-it-yourself photo books. It provides a wealth of features and masses of different ways to upload your photos, from a standard Java web interface to FTP, an iOS client and Facebook and Picasa integration.

Your images all have to be in JPEG format, though, and no larger than 10MB in size. Once uploaded, you can use Photobox’s gallery to share photos with friends who may wish to order copies of your prints.

Digital photos are by default printed at 6×4.5in, and when we switched to 6x4in mode, Photobox automatically added a border; make sure you manually switch the print finish to Gloss, rather than Gloss (Border) to avoid this. You’ll also want to check the cropping of your prints using the helpful preview interface, which allows you to click in to each photo.

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

Photobox’s performance in our tests this year was distinctly average. Its strongest showing was in rendering the rich colours and striking silhouettes of a landscape at sunset and the natural tones of green and yellow fields and cloud formations against a blue sky. Unfortunately, many of our prints had a slight red tint, which was particularly visible on pale skin tones and landscapes.

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

If you order between one and 199 6x4in prints they costs 12p each. You also get 50 free prints for joining. The standard price per print is very reasonable compared to the high street or to home photo printing, but is much higher than the prices charged by Photobox’s online rivals for similar quantities of photos. Poster prints and enlargements are also expensive compared to most retailers, although novelty items such as mugs and jigsaw puzzles are typically priced.

Between relatively high pricing and photos that don’t always reproduce the kind of accurate colour we expect, Photobox isn’t the best option for photo printing, although a range of special offers makes it worth a look if you want to order photo books. In general, however, we prefer Foto.com for online ordering, which is significantly cheaper and produced better-looking prints.