People Complaining about the Quality of Their Prints

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 25. July 2011 - 8:13

Over the weekend, I was speaking with a 1 hour photo-lab tech. She works at one the biggest chain of drugstores in Western Canada, London Drugs. 75 super-stores and most of them have their own 1 hour photo lab. I was asked to keep her anonymous.

According to Anon Ymous, London Drugs prints around 3 million photos per year. And London Drugs is a “very sharp” operator, some will say ruthless. They analyse everything, including the returns, complaints…

According to their studies, there are 4 main reasons for people being unhappy with their photos:

  1. Skin tones, like too red or too blue
  2. Under-exposure/too dark
  3. Not enough contrast
  4. Wrong cropping

And the complaints are in that order. According to Anon Ymous, this represent over 90% of all the complaints. London Drugs often does large custom prints (up to poster size) and Anon can't remember once having a large print returned because of the file resolution.