Whether a prosumer, hobbyist, or working professional, you have certainly looked around and done some comparison shopping as to what company would provide you with prints of your work. Some of you, like me, have probably run into local printing vendors who were either horribly over-priced or were not capable of printing larger format images for you, forcing your search online.

As a user at Deviant Art I purchased a print account quite some time ago.  In fact, it was during their 2-year anniversary (if memory serves) and the print accounts were offered half-price.  With no local options and my work already on Deviant Art, their print program seemed like a great option.  As the years went by, my work and needs have also changed, evolved, and adapted.

For the longest time, I have wished to see improvements to the Deviant Art Prints (DAP) program to make it more user friendly for experienced artists.  A fellow photographer recommended using Mpix.  After seeing some of his work printed I knew that I had to give them a test run and see how their services compared against that of Deviant Art Prints.

Some might cry foul here stating that Deviant Art built their print program on top of a “community” and did not start off with the same purpose as Mpix might have started with.  Deviant Art added the print program on top of the community and integrated it in, offering a cool and unique service that many communities cannot do.  All things considered, I think they did well with the integration, separating their site from others that are similar.

Regardless of origins, offering the same services opens you to the same critique.    For the review below, I compared both companies in the following categories: shipping, quality, uploading , pricing, options, and speed. Read more »

Oh Deviant Art, what are we going to do with you?

For many years now I have been a member at Deviant Art, sometimes active, and sometimes not.  An early criticism of the site was that it was a marketing engine and not a community as one might think of a community.  Who really cares, right?  It is up to them to make their money and they don’t have to promote themselves as an actual community.  I am sure a site of that size and traffic would require a healthy amount of money thrown at it in order to keep it working.

My interaction with that site has been both positive and negative, with most of the negative stemming from their print program.  I have long been a heavy critic of that service and also seen it drastically improve.  I had a membership for about a year which has since expired, so now I have been getting a taste of what a free member experiences.  And I am nauseated. Read more »