Jessop’s Nightmare

Ive got to say iam very angry to say the least at Jessop’s! I did a wedding about two months ago,
I printed some photos off for the couple and they where very happy, I did a DVD of the wedding as well! All went well until I gave them the disk with there photos on they went to Jessop’s in Chester and the couple came back to me and showed me the out come of the prints good god shocked wasn’t the word for it? Disgusted more like five of the photos where all pink two had the father of the bride cut off three of them and six lacked in colour? To me this is not Acceptable at all when I asked the bride what they say. They told her it was down to the photographer! I have printed all the photos off for them, As soon as they shown me Jessop’s and they are very happy, with the prints I did.
I told her to go to Max Spielmann to get any others printed which she did and they turned out very good indeed.
So be warned of Jessop’s I will never tell any one to go there again ever.
On thinking about what has happened they could off put me out of business or if they had not seen my prints they could had told every one never to use me! It made me feel sick. I thought that Jessop’s would have been fine I did ring Jessop’s and was told that there machine could have been playing up?? And when I asked why the fella told my customer it’s the photographer fault they said they would not know who would have told her that??
I just wanted to tell others and has anyone had the same problem?

Typical excuses from D&P services like that, blame either the camera or photographer, its not just Jessops, I bet even Max Spielman have done it before.

I cant get over it really P me off you know i bet they would as well i need some pro D&P service, not these lot

I used to go to Max Spielmans, until they screwed up the processing of some important film and screwed the exposure up, and then blamed me!
In all honesty I don't trust most high street processors, and I will go to more specialist places. The exception at the moment is Jacobs.

Get them to upload to places like Peak, or D&P etc and they will get better results.

Ignore Jessops and Max, they do my head in!

I had a bad experience with Max Spielman before. I asked them to do an A3 print of my bike and it turned out dreadful. The colours were all wrong and the print was out of focus (how the Hell they managed that was beyond me). My mate printed it for me and the result was perfect.

I should have taken both prints back to MS and demand my money back, but I had already torn it up in disgust.

I think the deal was the happy couple get a CD and sort the printing themselves. Shaun could steer them towards a better online service but a lot of people still struggle with things like that or don't have the internet access.

Puma, if you do paid weddings on a regular basis it may be worth investing in a good printer and doing the prints yourself, that way you retain the full process and don't run the risk of getting a potentially bad name. Moreover, the other advantages are you can make a few test prints and choose the type of paper for the desired look and keep everyone happy.

Gareth

When I was a student, I worked in one of these horrible 1h photo labs (main target group - Japanese and American Tourists that have only about an hour stay in Heidelberg and want to see the pics, they took the last two days: Paris, Barcelona, Rome, and Pisa). Whenever be produced horrible wrong pictures we were told to say: Photographers fault, no skylight filter etc. As 95% accepted it, this was the strategy (and I hated it). I made best experience so far with seenby.com. The nice thing with is, they do all kind of formats and they do it really 1:1 - you never make the experience of a crop. It is a bit more expensive and it takes 2 weeks but for something like wedding, it is worth waiting for good results isn't . Nice side effect, you can post up to 20 pictures at seenby to their stock library and if you are lucky, people buy them and you just have to count the money

"User error" seems to be a stock response by the incompetent in many industries. Just look at how many car faults are claimed to be driver error. In a pre-internet age they would have been able to dodge complaints that way, but now people can see how many others have exactly the same problem it's about time this blame-the-user attitude disappeared!

My first question is, why did you give them a DVD with pictures at print resolution? You've seriously damaged your profit margin. Reprints offer a tenfold profit. If I'm giving a DVD then pictures are a slideshow movie file. You can make more money after the wedding than actually from it.

If you had printed your copyright notice on the DVD then Jessops would certainly not have printed them.

However, it may have been your intention to generously offer the bride and groom copyright free images in which case none of the above applies.

I had Kodak ruin an un-reshootable job by putting reversal film through the negative bath. "the student done it" was the response and this before cross-processing became fashionable! I was hugely embarrassed and I lost a good client.

Although it might be a bit daunting for customers there is nothing to stop them using a professional lab. I recommend Loxley Colour in Glasgow and One Vision (was Colab)in Coventry.

I find it more convenient and far cheaper to use a pro lab than print myself and anyway most couples these days prefer digitally printed coffee table books than photographic prints or traditional albums.

I used to do weddings and portraits when I lived in Birmingham, and I always used Colab.
One thing I always did was ask for proof-prints first to show the client, then have final prints done of the ones that the happy couple wanted in the album.
I never had any complaints. Except when somebody wanted their baby "blown up"! quote "it's a nice picture but can you blow him up a bit?"