What quality are we talking for this? Can they take a 21 megapixel image in tif format or psd, and generate this at photo quality ?
I don't think so. It looks like their system is JPEG only, which can be managed on our end.
I myself have an epson 4880 printer.....Ink alone...!!!
I found their print quality (particularly on 12"x18") to be good enough that when my Epson wide format printer finally died, I decided to not bother replacing it.
We have tried the Costco method at 2 locations. Not very impressed. Often times they were cropped or off center and streaks....noise...gradient...This disappeared when we used our home Canon inkjet or had 20x30's done at a local printer.
I think it is important for us to remember that Costco is targeting the basic consumer who's looking for 4x6 prints of the kid's birthday party to send to Aunt Ethyl in Florida, so a lot of "make it easy/convenient" stuff is present.
The way that we can get more quality out of their service is to minimize them changing our original.
The default Costco settings will clobber your JPEG with a "Fast Upload" default setting. Changing to the "Full Resolution" option will help.
I think they have an "auto adjust" feature hidden somewhere ... best to similarly avoid like the plague.
I know that they have an "auto crop" feature too. There are adjustment tools, but we're probably better off if we minimize this from potentially messing us up by make sure that our original is of the correct ratio for our intended output format.
However, let us not forget that output formats don't all have the same ratio, so we may want to edit the original twice to put it into each of the two slightly different ratios and upload two versions instead of one. Yes, twice as much work, but not too much extra work. Remember, it is for the cause of a cheap print
A lot depends on your Costco. They don't print inkjet (mostly) but use standard wet chemical processing on Fuji Crystal Archive paper. They do use digital technology to expose the paper. We use them all the time and for LAUPS we have used them for gallery prints. At least in our hands Costco is just fine for display prints. They can take as big a file as you have bandwidth for over the cloud or you could bring it to them on a thumb drive.
Good points, particularly on the "sneakernet your USB flash drive". Expanding on that, I believe my local Cosco's "Photo Kiosk" also has slots that can take standard camera memory cards (eg, SD, Compact Flash). For those of us that are going to rework an image in Photoshop to the exact form we want to give Costco, one can reformat an existing CF card and then drop those Photoshop-reworked JPEGs on it.
BTW, not all of the Costco stuff is printed locally, so while some can have fast turnarounds, some (eg, print on canvas) can be a few days for its turnaround. This does mean that we can also consider some mail order companies as another printing alternative, I personally don't mind using Costco anyway, as they'll drop-ship to themselves and IIRC, not backcharge me for the shipping.
-hh
