“Your prints are cheap. Are they as high of quality as other photographer studio prints?”
That is the most frequent question I get about any service Mosaic Photo offers. This is an understandable question. Our prints are much cheaper than one would expect to pay, especially from a professional photographer. In case you were wondering, our prints start at $.60 for a 4×6 and $5.50 for an 8×10.
Our print prices are decidedly low. One of the reasons we started Mosaic Photo was a response to hearing the frustration from friends about the availability and price of prints. After paying the sitting fee, actually getting prints can be a lot extra.
So, it is a fair rationalization. “If their prints are so much more, the quality must be better.” Makes sense. And that’s what most studios these days want you to think, but that’s not the case at all. Our lab uses a chemical process to produce the highest quality on the best paper.
Allow me to get a little geeky. There are two main ways of photographic printing: ink-jet and chemical. Ink-jet prints are similar to your home printer, and produce the image by laying down very small dots of color. Sometimes, the dots are visible, leading to poor image quality. Another problem is banding, which are large streaks across an ink-jet print. Humidity and other environmental conditions can degrade the quality over time with an ink-jet print. We don’t use ink-jet printers. Our labs use chemical processing. Chemical printing is similar to traditional prints from film negatives. The result is a rich, clear, and smooth image.
All of that means that we use the highest quality process, on some great Kodak paper – either a traditional luster finish or some amazingly glossy metallic paper. (Yeah, I get excited about paper…) In essence, you get the same or better quality through us as the expensive prints.
A lot of pros make their profit on prints. We don’t. Instead, our sharing gallery is a service to our clients to make it easy to get high quality prints.
One of our core values at Mosaic Photo is to provide full service delivery of a great product. And to do that, we believe that you should be able to afford as many prints as you’d like – so we keep the cost of getting photos as low as possible. It’s a new way of doing business. We like it. We hope you do too.
Check out our sharing gallery in action for senior portraits, weddings, or VeggieTales.