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Stuff I Love: Persnickety Prints
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Happy Friday everyone! I am back with another edition of Friday Faves!
After last week’s foray into reality tv, I’m keeping things techy this week with a digital scrapbooking pick, none other than the fabulous…
Persnickety Prints!
For those who haven’t heard of Persnickety Prints before, Persnickety Prints is a professional photo lab that specializes in printing full-bleed digital scrapbooking layouts.
For the first four and half years I’d been digital scrapbooking, I was a loyal Scrapbook Pictures fan. I’d printed numerous layouts through them and had always been very pleased. On the one occasion I had some issues with a few of the prints I received, their customer service team took care of it right away and reprinted my layouts with no cost to me. As far as I was concerned, they were the printer for me.
But for months and months and months, I’d been hearing rave reviews about a new printer on the scene, Persnickety Prints. So back in October I decided to give them a try. I was impressed.
A few weeks ago when Persnickety Prints had a sale in honor of National Scrapbooking Day, I decided to try them out again. And I have to say, I was even MORE impressed the second time around.
Impressed probably isn’t even the right word. LOVE is more like it. Yes, in caps.
Why I Love Persnickety Prints
1. Amazing Quality
O.M.G the colors of these prints are SO rich and more importantly, dead-on true to the colors I see on my screen. It’s like my digital scrapbooking pages leaped off my screen and into the real world.
As a scrapbooker who loves to place thin symmetrical borders around her pages, I tend to be pretty picky when it comes to bleed (aka the amount of the edges that gets trimmed off in the printing process).
Persnickety Prints boasts their trim is less than 1/16 inch (you can read more about that here) and I have to say, comparing my printed layouts to my actual size layouts on my screen, you really can’t see any difference. Considering this border is only like an 1/8 of an inch that’s pretty awesome.
2. Lightning Fast Speed
I placed my order around noon on National Scrapbooking Day in the midst of their big NSD sale and received notice that my order had ship by that night. That’s what I call a fast turnaround.
3. Super Reasonable Pricing
At $0.99 ($0.79 during the sale) for an 8×8 print, they are one of the most reasonably priced photo printers in town.
Now with all this raving, is there anything I didn’t love about my Persnickety Prints experience?
What I Didn’t Love
1. The photo paper is pretty thin, thinner and less sturdy than ScrapbookPictures’ photo paper. Since the pages will be in page protectors anyway it’s not really an issue but it does make me a little nervous about them getting bent prior to making it into my albums (since we all know they’ll sit around for months before that happens, haha).
2. While the prints come in a nice strong box, I don’t like the way they tape the plastic sleeve down to the inside of the box. Now I know this is done so the pages don’t move around in shipping and get bent but it makes them a hassle to remove. Scissors are definitely required.
The first time I printed with them I had both 8x8s and 12x12s and I found it difficult to remove the package of 8x8s without worrying about damaging the 12×12 because of the way they were taped together. Including a stiffer piece of cardboard or cardstock in the sleeve with the prints would probably help with this as well as providing a bit more protection for the prints while they’re stored in the sleeve.
Persnickety Prints is a Fave
All that being said, the few negatives don’t outweigh the amazing quality, fast speed and reasonable pricing. It’s safe to say that I will be using Persnickety Prints again in the future. They are definitely a new FAVE of mine.
*Disclaimer: I was not perked anything in exchange for this review. I’m just a big fan and customer. 🙂
I love love love love PP too! Only place I will ever use. They are super fast and have the BEST customer service. Plus, I gotta love the digital freebies they give out too.
Yay, another PP lover! Totally agree about their customer service too.
Thank you for your review. We appreciate all feedback and will be brainstorming for a more customer friendly packaging solution.
The Persnickety Staff
No problem! Just doing what I can to show my appreciation with an honest review. 🙂
Another MORE-than satisfied customer of Persnickety Prints! Love the quality and speed, and their customer service IS amazing. Be sure to become their fan on Facebook for notices of sales, new freebie designs on their website, etc. I think the quality of their paper is fine, but I did get my prints put right into my scrapbook album to make sure they stayed clean and undamaged. And I didn’t mind the tape over the sleeve in the packaging at all – anything to make sure my prints arrive unbent and undamaged! :o)
Agreed, the prints are definitely in there securely – just a bit more securely than I personally would like, haha. It’s definitely not a deal-breaker though!
I just placed my first time order with PP. I put in my order around noon and an hour later I got an email they were shipped. I agree the pages look awesome. I agree with the packing, cardboard or something in between would be great. I’ve recommended them to everyone.
Aren’t they amazing? I can’t believe how fast they are!
I just popped over to your blog after seeing the link that the Persnickety people posted on Facebook. 🙂 Love your pages! I agree about the packaging. I ordered my Week in the Life album prints from them last year, so I got a pretty big stack all at once, and I was worried about messing up the pages when trying to get the tape undone and the pages out of the packaging. The digital papers and elements on my pages printed much darker than they looked on my screen even though I have my monitor brightness turned down all the way (not calibrated, though). That surprised me. But maybe the kits I used are just darker than I thought they were, and if I had my monitor calibrated, I would know that. Thanks for sharing your review! I’m going to go browse your gallery now for some inspiration. 🙂
Thanks so much for stopping by! My monitor isn’t calibrated either and I used to run into that same problem with Scrapbook Pictures prints so I was genuinely surprised by how dead-on the colors were with Persnickety Prints since my set up is still exactly the same.
Are you embedding your color profile into your files? I’m not sure which program you’re using but in Photoshop when you save a file there’s a little checkbox in the Save Dialog box that says “Embed Color Profile.” If you leave that checked when you save your jpg file, Persnickety Prints will be able to read the color profile from your file so they’ll know exactly which color space your page was created in. If you’re not already doing it might be worth a shot to try it and see if your colors come back more accurately when you embed the profile. I think this is partly why I’m getting better colors now than I did before with Scrapbook Pictures (since SP didn’t allow you to embed the color profile.)
Hope that helps!
Thanks Lynette, you are exactly right. Each monitor will vary, colors are backlit on your monitor, which will make them seem brighter.
Its the same way a slide works. If you put a slide in a projector, it will look different than the print in your hands, because the print isn’t backlit- or have a light source.
Our system does read your embedded color profile, if you aren’t using the sRGB, it will default to RGB.
If anyone has any questions, we are always happy to help!
thanks Lynette for your post- we love the picture of your print up against your monitor!
-PP
Great article and beautiful layouts. Would you mind sharing what color space profile you are using on your layouts? RBG or SRGB? One of these days I’m going to send the same layout in RGB and SRGB and see for my myself if it matters. My understanding is the SRGB color range is more limited (S as in safe choice, esp for web display), but I think it might also depend on how your printer sets up and calibrates their equipment.
Love your templates by the way!
I always use sRGB. If you’re printing through Persnickety Prints, their software is specifically designed to read sRGB accurately so that’s what they recommend as well.