Custom Wall Calendars, Part Three

We showed the two calendars to various friends. Most seemed to prefer the Ofoto calendar with its professional binding and nice packaging.

On Sunday, Dan and I got around to looking at the color print quality in detail, examining the two calendars with a magnifying glass and comparing them to the original JPEG's as displayed on my color-calibrated powerbook display.

Both calendars overemphasized reds and yellows; I wonder if this is intended to make family snapshots look warmer? Also, both calendars exhibited vertical banding, especially evident in low-contrast backgrounds.

In the end we slightly preferred the Ofoto calendar, but really expected Ofoto to do a better job of color management.

I used each website's support section to write to customer support complaining about the red shift and asking for a copy of their printer's color profile. Cafepress never wrote back at all. Ofoto wrote back to say that my images weren't of sufficiently highly resolution, which is both wrong and irrelevant.

We decided to add a third entrant to the competition, Kinko's. After a bit of wrangling, we managed to get all the images uploaded to the Kinko's site. They have a nice GUI for cropping and laying out the images. I was eventually able to order and pay for the calendar at their website, and arrange to pick it up at my nearest Kinko's store, thus saving on shipping.