Poster-Size Digital Enlargements from ThePosterPlace.com

On Trading Spaces, Frank, Laurie, and the other designers are always decorating with poster-size enlargements of digital photos. It’s a great idea! In fact, if you’ve got a halfway decent digital camera, you’ve very likely got all the images you need to launch your own personal art gallery. All you need, really, is someone to print the enlargements for you.

A well-equipped Kinko’s can handle the task. But when I went looking for someone to print a series of 24×36 posters for Video Library, Kinko’s wanted seventy bucks per print. You can get away with that kind of gouging when folks are in a hurry, but this case, I had time to wait. So, with an eye toward getting great posters at a bargain price, I fired up Google and went shopping. Here’s what I found out.

As you might expect, dozens of companies claim to offer digital prints at bargain basement prices. All too many of these, though, place severe limitations on the order. Many won’t offer odd, custom sizes. Others max out at 18×24. Still others offer good prices … but won’t do “one-off” printing, and insist you order your poster-size prints in lots of ten or more.

After an hour or so of online research, i wound up with two great candidates for inexpensive poster-size digital prints: ThePosterPlace.com and PixelOutpost.com.

I wasn’t blown away by ThePosterPlace.com’s website (no fancy web 2.0 goodness here!), but they offered a nice range of sizes at reasonable prices, and they provided both an email address and a toll-free number for contacting customer service … so I put them on my list. Their price for a 24×36 poster on satin matte paper? Just $18.95

My second choice, PixelOutpost.com, offered poster-sized prints … and a lot more. (In fact, if you like, they can convert your digital images into fine art prints up to sixty inches wide — and even print them on canvas!) Their price for a 24×36 poster on satin matte paper was forty bucks — almost twice the price of ThePosterPlace — but still a lot cheaper than Kinko’s.

(Note: I also approached a local company, Deville Camera, for a quote. While they matched PixelOutpost’s $40.00 price, the young woman on the phone warned me that “the poster machine’s down,” and couldn’t tell me when it would be repaired.)

Right before I uploaded my file, the folks at Video Library told me they wanted to be able to trim down the posters to fit an existing, 21×34 frame. At both the PosterPlace and PixelOutpost, I attached a comment to my order indicating the need to trim the final product down to this odd size, and asked them to prepare the poster with that in mind.

I uploaded my poster requests around 8:00 p.m. Around 10:30 p.m., I got a nice note from David at ThePosterPlace. In it, he mentioned he could trim the poster to the size I desired … and also pointed out that the poster itself appeared to have been designed with a 24×36 aspect ratio in mind. He said he would be happy to print it as provided, but wanted me to know that the final result would have big, white borders at the top and bottom of the print — even when printed and trimmed down to 21×34.

I was really surprised to get a customer support email in the middle of the night … and I really appreciated David catching the aspect ratio error. I quickly redesigned the poster with the 21×34 aspect ratio in mind and sent ThePosterPlace another file. They printed my poster the next day, and shipped me the result by Priority Mail.

Twenty-four hours later, I received an email from PixelOutpost. While they didn’t respond as quickly or as personally as David had, they did send a proof of my poster (which revealed the issue with the aspect ratio), and asked for my approval before printing it. I replied with the corrected file, PixelOutpost confirmed the receipt of the new image, and they promised to print and mail the new poster ASAP.

The final verdict: This week, I received both posters. They’re virtually identical; in terms of print quality and paper texture, I doubt anyone could tell the two posters apart.

While both companies alerted me, in their own way, to issues with my print request, I really appreciated the personal touch and quick response of the team at ThePosterPlace.com. For half the price of the competition (and for less than a third of what Kinko’s would have charged me), they provided a crisp, clear digital enlargement … and shipped it quickly, to boot.

ThePosterPlace.com doesn’t offer art-house quality prints on canvas, and, if I decide to transform some of my photographic masterpieces into fine art, I’ll give PixelOutpostl.com a holler.

But in the meantime, if you’re looking for high-quality poster-size prints of your favorite digital photographs at a remarkably reasonable price, ThePosterPlace.com is the place to go. In fact, I’m ordering five more posters this week.