HP Snapfish review

We awarded Snapfish five stars and recommended it last year, so we had high expectations. Unfortunately, its performance in our blind test proved to be a disappointment. Our panel was fairly satisfied with the natural tones of our landscape shots, particularly the glowing golden sky of our sunset. However, Snapfish’s reproduction of pale skin tones had oversaturated yellow and orange tones which gave our subject a flushed, almost jaundiced look, while colour reproduction in other shots was somewhat flat.

Here’s our natural skin tones test, scanned from the actual print, which failed to recreate the subtle, fair tones of the original – click to enlarge

Although it’s functional and fairly clear, the purchase interface that you must use to order prints looks rather dated. There are plenty of upload options available, though. As well as uploading JPEG images of a maximum 10MB in size, you can print photos from your Facebook and Flickr accounts, order by email and even upload from your smartphone using a dedicated iOS app or the site’s mobile version. You also get unlimited storage for your photos, making it easy for friends and family to order copies.

By default, Snapfish automatically removes red-eye, rotates and colour corrects any photos which it detects as requiring it, although you can disable this option using a tick-box. While most services use a Java-based browser upload utility, Snapfish just launches Windows Explorer and lets you select photos that way. It’s a much more elegant and easy-to-use approach. Once uploaded, Snapfish provides loads of options for sharing your photos via Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other social networks, as well as directly emailing your friends.

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

Once your pictures have been uploaded, all you have to do is add them to your shopping cart, where you and select the number of prints you want, in which sizes and on what kind of paper – either matt or gloss. Once you’ve ordered, Snapfish asks if you’d rather have photos with a digital aspect ratio printed at 5.3x4in rather than 6x4in. This smaller size allows the photos from some digital cameras to be printed without cropping, but we prefer traditional 6x4in glossy prints.

6x4in prints cost a reasonable 9p apiece, with 40 free when you sign up and postage costs of just 99p. The usual wealth of novelty items is also available, although Snapfish doesn’t provide as many different enlargement sizes as some of its rivals. The qualitative issues we saw in the Snapfish photos from this year’s test means that it’s not your best bet for online photo printing. Foto.com is cheaper and sent us better looking snaps.