MyPix review

The photo printing arm of budget Dixons Store Group retailer Pixmania has done well in our previous tests, so we were interested to find out how well it performed this year.

You can choose between a very basic Java uploader that simply lets you select photos one at a time via Windows Explorer, a more advanced click and drag Java applet or integration with Google’s Picasa galleries. There’s also an ActiveX uploader for Internet Explorer users. MyPix allows you to upload TIFF and JPEG images. Its different upload methods can handle a variety of file sizes ranging from 5MB to 20MB – the latter size is only guaranteed to be supported via ActiveX though.

With your photos uploaded, all you need to do is select an album or individual prints to order. By default, photos are ordered as 6×4.5in prints to approximate the most popular aspect ratio for digital photos. You can change this if, like us, you want traditional 6x4in print. Other options are also available, including sepia and black and white photo effects, borders and paper type, although almost all sizes are only available as glossy prints.

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

Before you choose your prints, you’re prompted to select your desired format and either economy prints, for which MyPix claims to use Kodak Edge paper, or more expensive premium prints on Kodak Royal Digital paper. We went for the budget option, which costs 8p per print, making MyPix the only service to have dropped its prices since last year’s tests. Despite our selection, the prints arrived on Kodak Royal paper. Paper notwithstanding, it’s worth noting that the promised delivery time for economy prints is within four days, rather than within 48 hours for premium ones. You can also get additional price reduction by buying pre-paid photo packs, which give you a fixed number of credits to use every year at around half the price of paying for your prints upfront.

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

MyPix was one of the better performers among the online photo printing services in our tests. Our evaluation panel wasn’t impressed by the overly bright and pale rendition of our day-lit landscape shots, but its reproduction of high-contrast night-time images was remarkably good, and its performance in the all-important skin tones test was excellent. Foto.com has lower prices and more consistent quality, making it the better choice.