Note: this product review was provided in exchange for the product only, but the review is my own opinion.
The other day I was contacted by Texas-based Elephant Stock, a company that sells printed art and printing services for photos. They agreed to send me a canvas 12×18 print of the following photo for evaluation:
Currently, this print size is on sale for $25.95USD on their website. Not long after I got the product in the mail:
It was packaged well and sufficiently padded. After opening it, it could find no damage to the print. The original file I sent them was 4881×3254, so that means about 271PPI, which is very high for a print this size. From a distance, the print certainly looks very nice:
The print itself feels decently made I looked very closely at the surface of the canvas and could not find any obvious flaws like small nicks or dents. What about the image quality up close? I used my Venus Laowa 50mm f/2.8X Macro at f/5 with a flash and manually focused onto a tiny square of the image, which corresponds to a 627×471 pixel piece of the original image, or about 0.26 megapixels. This is about 1.6% of the entire image. Here is a comparison with this tiny crop:
What we can see is their ink must have been sourced from somewhere in the Maluku Province of Indonesia, judging by the blue tones…okay, getting back to reality, I find the detail reproduction here very good. I can still see the basic fine-feather detail and some of the nastiness of the digital file has also been softened and smoothed too. (That’s the good thing about printing…sometimes the artifacts we don’t like just go away.)
Even when I put my face up close to this print, I like it. And of course, under 95% of viewing scenarios, the canvas texture is not even visible. I was also pleased that they did not alter or “enhance” the exposure, which has happened with prints before. I did feel the colours to be a bit cooler and not as rich as the original file, but that of course is probably due to my monitor calibration.
Overall, I like the product and so I’d say Elephant Stock could definitely be an option if you’re looking to print a few of your shots.