Some day my prints will come - the new art on canvas

PRIME – May 2013 By Gary M. Kaye Editor, In the Boombox Back in the dark ages of photography, if you were in love with one of the pictures you'd taken and wanted to blow it up, you would take the negative to your local camera shop and have it enlarged. These days it's a different and digital world. Many of the local camera shops have gone out of business. Most photography no longer uses film it uses memory cards. And now you can submit that picture online for a standard print, or you can get it reproduced on a piece of canvas, generally a way of having that picture made into a durable piece of art. The makers of these prints on canvas use high quality ink jet printers, much the same as today's photo printers. The quality of the finished product is quite good and theoretically, the canvas prints won't fade over time. But just like an artwork on canvas, these should be carefully handled, and unless you want a warped image, don't hang them over a working fireplace. If you go online you'll see that there are more than a handful of companies that offer photo printing to canvas. We looked at four different canvas picture makers to see how they stack up against each other and against some more traditional alternatives. While we picked one standard size of comparison, all of these companies offer custom services, from specialty sizing (we're fond of big panoramas) to filtering, retouching, photo restoration and more – often for an additional fee. We found that the print quality from all four companies producing these canvas prints was uniformly good, but it's too soon to see if the images will fade over time. Picture It On Canvas (PIOC) – This is one of the biggest makers of canvas prints. And you should take their posted price list with a large grain of salt, since they frequently run advertised specials with price reductions of 50 percent or more from their published rates. If you want to use PIOC, I definitely recommend waiting until they have a sale. Here's why – a 16-inch by 20-inch canvas will cost you $110. Add to that another $10 if you want a border. It's also another $10 for mounting hardware and a simple rear dust cover. Add $14.95 for shipping and you're up to $144.95, making this hands down the most expensive of the four services we looked at. Canvas on Demand – This company also offers discounts through Groupon and at their own website. For example, the last time we checked, the company was offering a 16-inch by 20- inch canvas for $39, marked down from $126.95, shipping included. The print included a color border and mounting hardware. CG Pro Print – This service is aimed at professional photographers, but amateurs can use it, too. They don't offer big discounts through coupons, but they don't really need to. Pricing for that same 16-inch by 20-inch canvas is $28. The print does come with hanging hardware and a rear dust cover. MyPix2Canvas – These folks also offer discounts right off the bat, but they aren't as deep as the competition. For example, a 16-inch by 20-inch canvas with a color border will cost $85.53 plus $9.79 for their cheapest shipping. Even with a 30 percent off promotional code, that still only brings the price to $59.87, plus shipping. It does, however, include both a rear dust cover and hanging hardware. For the sake of comparison, you can order a 16 inch by 20 inch photo print from Snapfish that's unframed for only $15, though a framed version, which is comparable to what you get on canvas, will cost you $55. A custom high quality print from a specialty lab like Modernage in New York City can cost between $48 and $100, depending on the quality you want, and that's without any mounting or framing. After years of investing in custom prints, some of which faded over time, so far we're thrilled with the results from having printed more than half a dozen pictures onto canvas. Will they last? Only time will tell. Gary Kaye is an award-winning journalist who has been covering personal technology since IBM introduced its first personal computer in 1981. He focuses on the nexus of Boomers, Seniors and Technology, and is the chief content officer at In The Boombox (www.intheboombox.tv) a website that covers technology from a Baby Boomer perspective.