Steve Harris

Both photography labs are based in the UK and Europe, PhotoBox is aimed more at the consumer market and has a lot of products on offer, whereas One Vision Imaging is a professional lab used mainly by amateur and professional photographers.

I should point out that I am not affiliated with either company, I signed up for a Zenfolio trial and thought I would compare the results of both before recommending them to clients. This is not a detailed scientific comparison of prints, its 5 minutes with a scanner.

It is difficult to compare physical prints online, but before I gave the prints out I quickly scanned them using a Canon MP560 scanner/printer, zipped them through Adobe Lightroom to match the crops as closely as possible and exported them below. Apologies for the poor crop, I scanned them so quickly I used the same automatic settings on each and for some reason the software took an inch off either side.

The left most picture is the original from Adobe Lightroom which was colour matched using a Colour Checker Passport, the middle picture is from One Vision Imaging, and the right most picture is from PhotoBox.

Remember the same automatic settings were used on each of the two scans, apart from differences in brightness the scanned images do reflect the physical prints well and do demonstrate difference between the physical prints.

As you can see, the colour of the child’s truck in the PhotoBox image does not match that of the original, and the skin tone is also off on the PhotoBox photograph. The One Vision Imaging photograph is far closer in terms of the trucks colour and the skin tone.

Physically the One Vision Imaging print is as accurate as you can imagine a print to be in terms of the truck, skin tone and colour of the child’s T-Shirt. The PhotoBox is not without merit though as it does have a vibrance about it, but for me the vibrance should not mean sacrificing the colour accuracy to this degree.

I still intend on offering both on Zenfolio, PhotoBox provides a surprising variety of products and are cheaper than One Vision Imaging, but it does prove that you get what you pay for so I will be recommending One Vision Imaging for those must have prints.