Since the birth of my son I’ve been taking mass amounts of photographs and for once actually needing to have them printed. You see I take a lot of pictures. With all good reason mind you, as my wife has gotten into the fine art of scrap booking.

This is all fine and great, I love taking pictures and even before the birth of my son decided to upgrade my camera to a Canon Digital Rebel XT which I must say I LOVE, though with the large lenses I’d kill for image stabilization. That however is another story entirely.

My quest started about a year ago while I was talking huge amounts of pictures for a local Basset Hound rescue I work with in order to get a select few printed, make cards or do other work. There are several places online but only two meet the “cheapskate” side of me. Those being Wal*Mart and Winkflash of which both are really cheap for the quality of what you get.

Being the cheapskate that I am I chose to go with Winkflash because of the few cents saved on print price and shipping. I did a test, having prints done of the same photos (3 of them) in 8X10 at both stores as well and thought that Winkflash did really well and was cleaner than the other which was the final deciding factor.

I’ve been doing business with them for some time and all has been flawless. That is until this last week. You see, I’ve had to have a lot of photographs taken care of and printed off. In one part because I fell behind on my sons pictures and another because my middle stepson graduated high school this year as well. So I placed 3 orders in a row, totaling almost $100.

There are two problems that came up with the pictures I received. One was that they were ALL printed on gloss, which I despise and fully recall setting to matte, and the second was that two of the 8X10’s of my stepson that I ordered were of people that I have NO IDEA who they were. In fact, it was of a man, a woman, and a really freaking large Marlin hanging from its tail at a marina somewhere in Mexico.

I can almost brush off the gloss photos, but receiving someone else’s photos is rather perplexing and bothered me quite a bit. I ended up emailing them and got the pictures in today that SHOULD have came with that order so they’re quick to correct their mistakes and very fast on shipping out those corrections. In fact, they came in faster than a normal order.

The gloss issue though? Well, I’m going to go ahead and blame what happened with that on the software they provide for photo management and uploading. It’s possible that I have an older version of the software. I couldn’t begin to tell you though since when I go to the “Check for Updates” option in the program it goes to a 404 not found error on their site. And to top that off, they don’t say anywhere on the site what the latest version is.

The verdict? I still like Winkflash and love the quality of the matte photographs that I actually order that come in. For now though, I’m going to take a break and sink some money into the massive mogul known as Wal*Mart’s photo lab.