Bonusprint review

Last year’s Best Buy winner, Bonusprint, did fairly well in this year’s tests, too, but the panel in our quality tests wasn’t entirely satisfied with its reproduction of all of our prints. Its worst failing was in our photo of a rich sunset landscape: the colour balance was completely wrong, producing intense purple tones where both rival printers and the original image portrayed subtle deep blues.

Bonusprint slipped up on this print particularly, scanned from the actual print – click to enlarge

This is unfortunate, as in all our other photo quality tests, Bonusprint did very well, with very accurate natural colours in day-lit landscapes, very fine detail and beautifully subtle skin tones.

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

Bonusprint allows you to create web albums which you can make available to share publically or password protect for selective viewing. Unfortunately, although it has all the usual helpful features, the company’s website feels somewhat inelegant. The design, with raised button-effect tabs, looks dated and you have to switch between separate pages to view albums and upload new photos to them. At least the browser-based upload utility is a standard-issue Java affair that makes it easy to select photos for upload.

Once you’ve got an album uploaded, things become smoother, with a handy pull-down menu to order either individual photos or entire albums in different print sizes and finishes. Images are automatically cropped and rotated, although one was incorrectly rotated. This doesn’t affect the quality of the print, though, although it makes it a little harder to assess your preview images. If the web interface doesn’t strike your fancy, there’s also a Windows upload utility and an iOS app that you can use to make your orders.

Bonusprint’s prices have gone up significantly since last year and it’s this that’s had the greatest impact on its score. This year, 6x4in photos now cost 14p each if you order between 10 and 49 prints, although, as with most retailers, you’ll get better deals if you order more: if you need 500 photos for any reason, they’ll cost just 5p each. Despite such economies of scale, the fact that smaller numbers of prints cost so much makes Bonusprint seem expensive, especially when Foto.com produced better looking prints at just 5p each.