John, Mpix.com

I ordered a 24×36 gallery wrap from them and it arrived within a few days of ordering which was impressive. However the quality wasn’t that great. Black streaking lines began to appear where it wraps on the frame! Soon people began commenting on the black streaks as they were distracting from the beautiful photo. I have since removed the photo from view.

I contacted Mpix customer support about this issue on July 29 and on July 30 Matt from Mpix agreed to reprint the gallery wrap and put a protective coating on it. I was impressed with the quick response and happy they were going to reprint it. If I were to ever use them for my professional work it would be important to me that if a customer had an issue with a print that Mpix would be responsive and take care of any issues ASAP.

Unfortunately this turned out not to be the case. I waited a couple weeks and the reprint never showed up. So on August 13 I contacted Mpix again to check on the status. I never received a response and again contacted them on August 19. Finally on August 20 Matt emailed me back and said he thought I had received the reprint and that he would check into things. He asked me to upload the image again so they could do the reprint.

It is now August 29 and still no reprint and no word from Mpix. If this had been a print for one of my customers I would have had a very upset customer that probably wouldn’t be doing business with me again. Well, actually after the first week of not hearing from Mpix I would have done the reprint at my own expense with a more reliable and professional company.

It is because of this that I cannot recommended Mpix for professional work.

Greg

Thanks

This Adobe white paper might help:
http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/pdfs/phscs2ip_colspace.pdf

As far as monitors, I’ve got two that are nearly the gamut of Adobe RGB (1998) and far, far wider than sRGB. Such displays are actually affordable these days.

For my work, even Adobe RGB is too small. But I output to Epson K3 inks which have colors that exceed this space. And my capture device (Raws from a Canon 5D) produce far wider gamut too. I want to store and use all the colors I’ve captured.

IF the capture device and working space are larger than the output color space, there’s going to be clipping. If you clip to sRGB, its not like you’re going to get awful prints! The workflow does work. But you’re throwing away colors that you could potentially print. If your work is brides in white wedding dresses, you’ll never notice a difference. If your work is of a highly saturated nature (say Jay Maisel kind of work), it could. And we don’t know since we don’t have an output profile from so many providers. Nor as I said can we soft proof, control the rendering intent (which is image specific, not output specific) or post edit the image based on that soft proof. So its not ideal but it works. Its a workflow that blows lots of prints out the door quickly. But its not ideal in terms of end user control.

Lots of labs do profile their devices and supply them to customers. If and when more customers ask for this, its more likely we’ll see it offered.

Adobe didn’t put all that custom soft proofing in Photoshop, or the ability to convert working space images into output ready color just for grins. Soft proofing is a major big deal. We’re hearing many LR 2.0 users asking how that one got missed from the release….

It is actually $2.00 a poster. You just saved yourself 2 bucks.

I had 12 posters printed, one for each kid on my sons little league team. You should have seen their faces when i passed them out. I was actually a bit skepitcal since I always believe you get what you pay for. But for 2 bucks you can’t beat it. The color is not the greatest but again for 2 bucks it is worth it.

One of the new features of MPIX 2.0 is that you can mix paper types in a single order, which you couldn’t do previously.

On the sRGB color space question (as well as TIFF vs. JPEG, 8 vs 16 bit), MPix says don’t worry about it, although folks might not find their explanations convincing. You can read their take on it here: http://mpix.com/support/Help.aspx?id=3.

My question is 8 or 16 bit and TIFF or JPEG for their true black & white process. I tried an 8 megapixel comparison at 8×12 inch size and tested the prints on my friends. As I recall, one person out of about a dozen confidently and correctly selected the 16-bit TIFF over the JPEG. I’m curious about the experience of others.

I don’t know where I read it, but I thought MPix uses a Lightjet for photographic prints. I remember seeing long ago an offer on mpix.com to send printer profiles to those who want them for soft-proofing.

Their metallic paper works so well on some prints. Whenever folks see my metallics they ask “how did you do that?” MPix!

I’ll have to check out 2.0. I haven’t ordered from them in at least 2 weeks, so I better check out the changes.

Thanks for the recommendation in the first place. I always find good information here!