Over the past couple of months, we’ve all seen the Pro Pics Express banners all over the Corner. In addition, Pro Pics Express has been a sponsor in the past 3 newsletters, Contest Corner Challenges (#27-#29), as well as the November ‘06, December ‘06 and the January ‘07 Photograph of the Month contests (as well as being a sponsor for the PhotographyCorner.com 2006 Photograph of the Year Contest). All in all, you should be familiar with Pro Pics Express. They’ve awarded almost $5,000 in gift certificates to the members of PhotographyCorner. I recently had a chance to ask Paul Kimball of Pro Pics Express a couple of questions about the company, the services they offer, and what we can expect fro Pro Pics Express down the road.

Pro Pics Express is a full-service, online photo printing site. With hundreds of other photo printing sites out there, what makes Pro Pics Express stand out above the rest?

Unlike most Online Photo Finishers, our foundation was in the custom photo finishing segment, or what is referred to as the “Pro Lab” market. Even today all photographic printing is done on Kodak Professional Endura papers, which are the finest in the world.

In addition to simply photo printing, what other services does ProPics Express offer?

For the past year we have offered products off of our four-color HP Indigo 5000 Digital Press, which includes PhotoBooks, calendars, greeting cards, and even some commercial printing applications. We also offer museum-grade canvas prints, where we use an inkjet application to apply pigment-based inks directly to Artist’s Canvas, then stretch them around the frame in a term called a “Gallery Wrap” for immediate display.

ProPics Express was born out of CPQ. What is CPQ, and how did the experience behind CPQ help make ProPics Express so successful?

We were able to take our thirty years of color knowledge and combine that with the more recent technical innovations that Digital brings to the table. It is still a print made with a wet process, so that part has not changed. Managing a customer’s image to make it look its best is still our goal.

You use a ROES software program to handle the uploading are ordering process. What is ROES, and how does it work? What benefits does this present to photographers using your services?

ROES is an acronym for Remote Order Entry Software, it is a program developed by Softworks Systems, Inc. It is JAVA based, so updates and new products (which we constantly add) are automatically included when the user fires up the software. It works on both Windows and MAC OS10.x and up. We actually have two separate ProPics Express Client downloads – one for silver halide printing and one for items off the Digital Press. User info and credit card data are zipped and encrypted upon upload to our lab, so there is no worry about security breaches.

What else makes your software so user-friendly and unique?

The ability to crop and position images on the fly is nice, as is the ability to position it relative to a frame (we sell some prints and frames together as specials). There is a vast number of things you can do with your images, and the software lets you see things as they will print as you build your project – be it a PhotoBook, Calendar, or regular prints.

What additional products can we expect to see from ProPics Express in 2007?

The growth in the online photo finishing business is shifting away from traditional photographic printing as we better the output technologies. Most of the new items in ProPics Express will be an expansion of the Digital Press Products – Bookmarks, magnets, mousepads, and the like. We will also continue to offer new print/frame combinations from time to time using the Kodak Professional Papers along with some new layout designs.

To download the Pro Pics Express software (free) to see how easy it is to use, check out http://www.propicsexpress.com/software.aspx.