Online printing that accepts lossless images?

[nickdu]

Not sure if this is an appropriate question for this forum.

Maybe I'm being extreme, but after spending a bunch of money on a decent camera and trying to do everything I can to end up with the best images possible, it seems crazy to use a lossy compression format which could introduce compression artifacts into my images.

I don't print my digital photographs myself but instead use an online site. In the past I simply uploaded the jpeg images the camera produced. Now I'm looking for an online site which will not only allow me to upload images which are not compresses in a lossy format but also print the image from the copy I have uploaded (as opposed to allowing me to upload a non-lossy image and then compress it using a lossy format and print that lossy compressed image). Can anyone recommend such a site? I have done some other searching and thus far have only come up with http://www.adoramapix.com. I haven't tried them yet, but I plan to soon.

Thanks,
Nick

[DavidB]

Nick

Appropriate subject or not, the issue you raise is relevant to anyone who uses digital imaging, and it's a pity no one has responded before now.

There is a reason why on-line services typically use the JPEG format - data rate. The DSL connections most of us now use are way faster than dial-up, but still not fast enough to cope with, say, dozens of 50MB images from each customer. And if, as is typical here in the UK, your connection is ADSL, the upload speed at the subscriber's end is way slower than the download speed.

Does it matter if your images have artefacts? Not necessarily. All images, of every kind, contain some sort of artefact, so the issue is to keep them within manageable proportions rather than eliminate them completely.

Most people will, in my view, be unable to tell the difference between a first-generation, high quality (95%+) JPEG and a TIFF file produced from the same pixels. But the JPEG will typically have a much smaller file size than the TIFF. I would guess that, if you do your conversion to JPEG only when you produce the file for print (which may in any case require different processing from the files you produce for on screen display), and you do not use high levels of compression, you will not be able to see any file format artefacts in the final output.

I hope that this is helpful.

David