Lumière d’Argent

In a word, they work great. Print quality is great, support is responsive, must be excellent… for US-based customers.

After having set up a few galleries, I got an order from a customer in Germany. That felt great! The customer places his order, I get the notification from Exposure Manager, I produce the print files and uploads them and the day after Exposure Manager prints and sends them. More than two months later, the customer is still waiting. Including for the re-print Exposure Manager offered at no charge.

I know Exposure Manager is not to blame, at least not 100%. It appears the problem is solely our unreliable european state-owned posts. It does not make the slightest difference for any of their employees wether the mail arrives or not. And it shows.

I would not write this if it was my first problem with them:

• I had a parcel taking six weeks from the South of France to here (about 900 km).
• The SmugMug test prints took a month to arrive. Of which about 25 days in my local post office.
• Our Luxembourgish posts knows: they subcontract international parcel deliveries to TNT. And when it is for France they advise not to write on the parcel what it is, because it raises the chances of theft by the post personnel. I never had a problem sending.

The only thing I could blame Exposure Manager for is that they did not listen to my advise and sent the re-print through the same way instead of calling DHL or UPS or whoever with global presence. I’d have paid. Apart from that, they always answered my mails quickly and patiently (I can get nasty). The month following the order I got a check from them with my profit. They fully refunded the customer. I did not cash the check but I could have. I have no doubt about their quality.

For me, though, it is back to the drawing board.

Stephane :: Mar.04.2008 :: Printing, Sales :: No Comments »

They arrived with an apology from the local Post. SmugMug was not at fault, nor was EZPrint. They proceeded diligently, but there was a mistake done in the post here.

The prints arrived rolled in a tube and the tube was in… nothing. The parcel was just the tube. Nothing happened and the tube appears strong enough to protect the prints, but all in all it does not give the same impression as the parcel I got from ExposureManager. I thought they used the same lab, but they don’t. Also, there is a prominent SmugMug label on the tube, inviting the customer to contact them in case of problem. As I said before, the customer buys from SmugMug, not from me, and is reminded so.

I had ordered the same prints on the 3 different papers. To my surprise, I actually prefer the glossy one to the luster. There is a bigger surprise: metamerism failure. All three papers show a tint under some lighting.

Under natural light, glossy is neutral, matte is slightly warm and luster is green. Under tungsten, luster is neutral and the other two are pink. I don’t notice anything similar with the EM print on luster. They both use Fuji Frontier printers and both use the same Fuji paper, so I don’t know.

All three prints are from the same file and all three were ordered at the same paper size. They are supposed to print borderless yet one of the three has a white border on one side. Precision appears to be so-so. The problem here is that, unlike ExposureManager, SmugMug does not allow for proper separation between the file used for screen presentation and actual print files. Borderless prints are useless for framing! How can’t they understand that?

All in all, this shows amply that SmugMug can not be a solution to sub-contract orders fulfillment.

Stephane :: Dec.25.2007 :: Printing, Sales :: 2 Comments »