Just a quick product review today. I recently ordered 3 20" X 20" Standouts from MPix for display on my bedroom wall. Standouts are photos mounted on 1 1/2" gator foam with a banding (optionally either black or white) around the edge. The Standouts come with holes pre-drilled in each corner of the back for hanging. The look of the final product is similar to a gallery wrap but with the Standout you don't lose any of the photo around the edges (a gallery wrap usually wraps the photo around the edges of a frame so that your photo covers all visible surfaces). Because I wanted to use a panoramic image in three pieces (rather than going to one large custom sized 20" x 60" standout) I needed the surface edges to match up. I was very pleased with the quality of the construction of the standouts and the image processing was up to Mpix's usually high standards. I did note that one of the three pieces was slightly smaller in dimension than the other two but the difference (probably 1/16th of an inch) was acceptable to me. Mpix has a 100% guarantee so they would have fixed it if I had found it to be unacceptable. While the holes on the back of the standouts allow Mpix to sell them as "ready to hang", I didn't even want to try my luck at evenly spacing and leveling 6 hangers (two holes on each standout) so I installed a narrow photo ledge I picked up at Ikea last weekend. This let me get everything spaced and leveled exactly the way I wanted it and I will be able to easily change out the images for different ones over the years with minimum effort.
Standouts are a permanent and fairly expensive option for displaying your images. These 20" x 20" standouts were $80 each; a lot of money to be sure but not necessarily more than you would spend on prints + mats + frames if you went the more traditional route.
Overall I was perfectly satisfied with my Mpix purchase and plan on purchasing more in the future.
For those who are interested, the original photo is a crop of a single image rather than multiple images spliced together and so the the file size was rather small (I started, before the crop, with a 10 mega pixel file from my Canon 40D). I used Photoshop CS3 to up size the image to Mpix's minimum standard of 100 dpi and then cropped it into three different files which I uploaded to Mpix.com. I was concerned that the resolution of the final image would suffer a lot as a result of all the up sizing but, while there was of course some loss of sharpness as compared to the original image, I was very pleased with the result.
Title: "Mpix Standouts"
