People often ask me for technical advice related to photography, and recently I have had a couple people ask me where was the best value to get prints made. For the last ten years or so my place for the best value has been The Photo Lab in Costa Mesa.
There are lots of low budget options for printing now in the digital age. Costco, Walmart, on-line printing sites, on-line photo sharing sites, you name it. Some might produce decent prints but the overall quality is not always there. The old saying holds true with most of these, “you get what you pay for”. I have not found a low budget option the rivals the quality and control of a good professional lab, and I am lucky that one of the best labs in Southern California is less than a mile away from me.
In the digital age where all our information is stored on a hard drive, in a device, or in a cloud someplace some people may question why even make prints anymore? We make prints because the images are special and we want them to last. We want them readily available to view and we want to hold on to the special people and moments the images documented. If you agree with this opinion then to me it only makes sense to make the best possible prints you can. It’s not like the days of film when prints were often more like proofs. Get the roll developed and let’s sees what we got doesn’t happen anymore. We know what we have, we have edited and chosen our images and we have made most of the corrections. The only thing left to do is produce a good output of the image.
Low budget labs are not set up to have the same level of control for color accuracy and often use lower quality materials. Prints curl, images fade, and surfaces are less scratch resistant. Prints are less likely to be archival which is a huge issue for me because if I make a print I want it to last and I want it to look as good as the day I had it printed.
The Photo Lab has shown me consistent quality and they are reasonably priced. I know the owners and all the employees, everyone is nice and they know what they are doing. They care and if there is ever an issue they correct it. Beyond regular prints they provide most any photographic service you could imagine. They do especially well with large prints, doing those all on site.
