Poor Quality (Bonusprint)

Member Name: MrsWillow

Product:	Bonusprint
Date:	11/07/09 (53 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use, fast upload

Disadvantages: Poor quality uploaded pictures

Having received a promotional code to get an A5 photobook for just P&P of £2.50 I decided it was worth giving Bonusprint a chance. I remember them being about when I was a kid and my Mum used to send our holiday pictures away in the paper envelopes as it was cheap.

Well they are still cheap. But now they do cheap digital.

And you can tell.

Getting started on the site was quite straight forward, you download an application which saves to your desktop and use that to design your photobook. So rather than uploading your pictures then designing your photobook like some other sites you transfer the pictures to the application and design it on your computer. The application was simple to use, however, I struggled to get a proffesional feel to the photobook as the backgrounds available weren't all that good and some of the 'frame' designs and page layouts looked quite poor. In the end I decided to stick with something simple in plain colours and plain design. One aspect I did find useful was that it would 'auto fill' your pictures in date order or alphabetical order into the photobook fitting the page layouts to fit all your pictures into the book which was useful as I had more pictures than pages so some pages required a layout with multiple pictures and the application did this for me so I could just then tweak it around a little rather than having to start from scratch.

Once you are finished giving your pages backgrounds etc then you save your design and upload the whole design to Bonusprint. Thus didn't take as long as I expected with the number of pictures I had to upload - however when I recieved my photobook I realised why!

The upload was fast because it had been done at low quality, which as a result means that the pictures in the photobook look grainy - some of the pictures were of proffesional quality and even they looked grainy. I have had the same pictures printed on my home printer which is a cheap printer and they looked much better.

The delivery was relatively reasonable, it took about a week for my photobook to arrive.

I have to say I am glad I didn't pay full price for my photobook. I will certainly be sticking to Photobox in the future.

Summary: You get what you pay for - in my case not very much at all.