Best Online Printing lab - DS Colour Labs
Digital photography is great in many ways, but it's very easy to end up only seeing your photos on screen. A good photo printing lab is essential if you want to get the most from your photographs.
I used to use a small pro-lab in Lancaster to do my printing; they were great, and I still think about the chap who ran it when I think about professionalism. Now I get all of my printing done at DS Colour Labs. I originally used them to print a considerable number of photographs up to 20*18 to show a project to the Wapping Project.
I unashamedly used them because they were cheap, and was surprised when I found their quality surpassed prints I’d paid ten times as much for. They’re printed on Fuji Frontier 570 printers, which seem to be quite standard among the better labs, whom they justify being able to undercut because of automation and lots of customers. Thank you, Capitalism.
Print quality is obviously important, but they succeeded in taking my business away from the London labs by virtue of their speed and ease of ordering. I quite regularly, for their normal delivery charge, receive my prints the next day. They arrive in custom-made packaging, which is refreshingly minimal and effective at keeping them safe in the post.
Their website looks bare and industrial, and I prefer it to wading through the flashy graphics of more established online labs; their uploader also works well. There’s a minimum of marketing, and special offers are straightforward discounts instead of starter ‘free prints’ offers.
I believe they do photobooks, which I’ve got on my to-do list to try, but these aren’t as big as some of their competitors; watch this space for my thoughts on these. Just to give an idea of pricing, an 18*20 print is ridiculously cheap at £1.10, but anything larger moves into ink-jet territory with a corresponding jump in price.
If you do get larger prints, please do drop me an email and let me know what you thought of them as I’ve not used these yet. Likewise, I’d be interested to hear how they do with film processing as this is something I still have done locally and would be up for a change– I can be reached at ben@benevansphotography.com, or here 
on Twitter.
