How Free is Free Anyways?

February 18, 2008

PhotographyBB Puts HP’s Snapfish to the Test!

As some of you may have noticed, we are advertising the HP Snapfish promotion for February:20 FREE PRINTS at Snapfish!

Before putting this on the site for you all to try, I decided to take advantage of this offer to find out just how free “free” is. The first thing I did was visit the Snapfish site, and create a login. The account creation page was extremely easy to follow, and I was registered within seconds. The website is very user friendly, and has a clean professional feel to the site. So, the offer is for 20 free prints with no indication of having to pre-purchase something - Let’s find out how good the deal really was.

Upon registering my account, I was brought to a “create your album and receive 20 free prints” page. Normally I am used to getting free stuff after having to purchase something, but so far, this didn’t seem to be the case. The first place they bring you is to an album creation page where you can seperate your photos into albums. Since I was only going for the 20 FREE PRINTS at Snapfish! offer, I only created the one album. You are then brought to an easy upload page to upload the photos which you would like developed. HP Snapfish offers a very simple uploading tool which they call “Quickupload,” and in all honesty, it truly lives up to its name. It was easy to use, and the upload speeds were faster than I expected. It took approximately only 3 minutes to upload around 60MB of images (20 high-resolution images).

After the upload process was complete, you can either upload more photos, create additional albums, or proceed to the checkout, which is what I did next. Upon checking out, you are shown your uploaded photos as thumbnails one last time (where you can also conveniently order additional individual prints in a variety of sizes: wallet size, 4×6, 5×7, or 8×10 - for each photo), and you can choose matte or glossy paper. We’ll have to do a matte vs glossy article one day soon, that’s a debate I always love having. The final option is what type of image border you would like for your photos. Usually, I choose a plain white border, however this time I opted to go for no border. The border choices are: None, white thin, white torn (a very cool torn edges border look), and black thin.

The last thing I took notice of, before checking out, was the $0.00 price for my images - still looking good at this point! I hit the final checkout button which brought me to the shipping details page. Shipping charges were extremely reasonable (I never expected free shipping since it’s a genuine cost that HP Snapfish incurs). If you live in the USA, there are a variety of shipping choices ranging from 3-5 business days ($1.97), 2 business days ($6.97), or overnight ($9.97) all of which do not include processing time of course. You can also opt to pick up your photos at participating retailers which are listed on the site. I live in Canada, so there was only one option for international shipping to Canada, which was a reasonable price of $2.97

In the end, that’s all I wound up paying for the convenience of having my photos developed, and the 20 prints were in fact free without having to purchase anything further; “Free” was free! The per image price for additional photos is only 9cents too.

Based on the ease of use, the honesty of the promotion, and professionalism from HP Snapfish, PhotographyBB concludes that this promotion is genuinely a great deal. Stay tuned for more as we review the rest of this transaction when the photos arrive. We’ll look at delivery time, quality, and post sale service from HP Snapfish.

Get your 20 Free prints by clicking here:20 FREE PRINTS at Snapfish!

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Posted in Reviews