Group Test: Bonusprint

BonusPrint is one of the best-known photo labs among photographers. As major players in the age of postal processing for films, they’ve now successfully moved into the digital arena.

Unlike the other online labs that we looked at, though, BonusPrint relies on desktop software for designing photo books rather than letting you do it online through your browser.This process involves downloading an 18MB application. However, this shouldn’t put off broadband users – those without broadband will not be able to use online photo services anyway, because the photo transfer speeds will be too slow.

Once installed, the BonusPrint PhotoBook Editor is easy to use, but it’s also quite old-fashioned to look at, rather like a budget desktop-publishing program. For example, when you double-click a text box a separate text-editing window opens up.

The program can autofill the album using pictures from a folder on your hard disk, or you can choose a layout for each page and add photos individually. If you choose autofill, it’s possible to change the layouts later.

We found that photos from one camera were sometimes rotated incorrectly, while those from another weren’t. Even without incorrect rotation, the software did sometimes crop vertical-format shots to put them in horizontal frames, and vice versa.

There is a choice of colours for the cover, but while you can pick different page layouts inside the book, you’re limited to a plain white background. Each page can contain between one and 12 images, depending on the layout.

The advantage of designing a book using a desktop application is that there’s more freedom when positioning photos and text boxes manually, and you can choose different fonts and text sizes too.

When the book is finished, it’s uploaded to the BonusPrint website. This process didn’t take as long as uploading all the individual photos to the other sites, which suggests that the software generates more compact, ready-to-print pages than full-resolution images.

We were expecting an album with a die-cut cover, like the Kodak’s and the Photobox’s, but it turned out to be plain. A check of the small print revealed that while a cut-out book was used for illustration on the website, this option is only available when you order the leather version. The finish was good but the plain white page backgrounds looked a bit dull.

Photos were printed with saturated colours perhaps just a little stronger and smoother than the others, although they seemed to lack a little definition in comparison. However, the differences in both cases were small.

This article is part of a group test of photo album services
See also:
Kodak EasyShare Gallery
PhotoBox
Snapfish
Choose the best imge format
Go local
Photo Albums
A table of features can be read via our pdf downloads above

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