Monitor Calibration

[Kayaker72]

Millers is another good lab, however, Mpix has been VERY good to me. There's been a few occasions where prints shipped very dark, at first I thought it was my monitor but it wasn't. They reprinted all of the prints for free and shipped them out the same day. Their customer service for the past few years has been really good.

Exact same issue, but very different response from Mpix. I was making an album for a family member in 2014 and decided to do a test. I sent pictures to 4 labs: Mpix, Adorampix, Snapfish (my wife loves their sales), and a local Walgreens. I sent the entire 200 picture album to Mpix and only 8-10 pictures to the other labs assuming Mpix would come out best. The entire set from Mpix came out a half to a full stop dark while, in terms of brightness, the other 3 labs were good. I called Mpix, who were double the price of the next highest lab (Adoramapix) and 6-8 times that of snapfish, and tried to talk to them about it. Just to keep this short, they refused to reprint the pictures and had a bit of attitude about it.

That said, other than being dark, they were the best. Granted, only slightly better than Adoramapix (who I have used since). But you could really see the difference between Mpix/Adoramapix vs Walgreens/Snapfish.

I stopped looking into all of the technical stuff on the screen such as 10bit, AdobeRGB, etc. What's the point right now when print technology has not increased and most people can't see the difference anyways. :|

Maybe that will change down the road, but for now, I'm saving myself the frustration. At least I know my colors are calibrated the way I want them.

I think I have hit this point. My winter project is almost complete, I have learned a fair amount. I'll send out some prints just to confirm, but we live in an 8 bit world. I can live with that.

What does crack me up is that groups like Netflix are starting to stream 4K 10bit (even heard reference to 12 bit), but for photography, we have 8 bit outputs.