Kodak Gallery review

Kodak is still synonymous with photography, and the company makes the very paper used by half the printing services here. This means that Kodak Gallery is a natural first stop for anyone looking for online photo printing.

A simple uploader allows you to simply browse for and select images using Windows Explorer, making it easy to select up to 400 images at a time. Once uploaded, you can share your photo albums via Facebook. Provided you make at least one order per year you get unlimited online storage for your photos.

Once you've uploaded your photos you can use Kodak's online editing interface to crop, rotate, remove red eye and even fix minor blemishes. The editing features are rather crude. We found that red eye removal just paints dark dots over your image, for instance, making it particularly ineffective given that you can't zoom in on images within the interface for precision work.

Once you've made any desired changes, it's time to add the prints and other items you want to your basket. You can choose from a variety of sizes between 3x2in and 30x20in, as well as photo books, calendars and novelty items such as stuffed toys and printed mugs. Standard 6x4in prints cost 10p if you order between one and 100 of them. As well as the web-based uploader, you can order your prints via a Windows utility or email. Whichever method you choose, your images should be in JPEG format and no larger than 25MB each.

This graph totals our blind test scores from all the prints in a stacked bar graph, so you can see which service did best overall and where their individual strengths lie - click to enlarge

Unfortunately, our panel of judges wasn't impressed by the general quality of the Kodak Gallery prints. The reproduction of pale skin tones was a particular stumbling block - the subject of our portrait looked a little flushed, but we also found that the entire print looked rather dull, with a bluish cast to white areas and a greenish one where there should have been only yellow. This dullness and oversaturation of blue tones affected other prints, as well.

Here's our natural skin tones test, scanned from the actual print, which failed to recreate the subtle, fair tones of the original - click to enlarge

Kodak Gallery's prints and prices are both mediocre. It's not the worst deal around, but you can find both better quality and lower prices from other online photo printers. Our Best Buy winner, Foto.com, has both.