Bridget’s Birthday Bash {mpix.com review and giveaway}

Disclosure: This post is part of my week of giveaways.
I did not receive any compensation for this post.
The opinions below are pure Bridget and I am happy to have the chance to introduce you to one of my favorite companies, mpix.com. 

I take lots of pictures. Lots of them. Sometimes I use my ‘big girl’ camera to take nice pictures, and when I do I use a professional printer. But I sometimes still just take snapshots of my kids and I like to print those at mpix.com. They have reasonable prices (not much  more than the big box store near you) and the quality is noticeably better. Sharper, cleaner, brighter, and not green-tinted. (Why are the ones from big box stores always greenish, anyway)? But even just taking snapshots with my ‘big girl’ camera can be impractical, and for the day-to-day operations of our house I find myself relying a lot on my iPhone. Imagine how excited I was to find out that mpix had a new TapToPrint app that would allow me to order photos right from my phone! The app is super easy to use. It doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, but I think that’s a good thing! Upload your image and zoom in if you need to, choose what size,  and decide if you want color or black and white. Then you’re ready to go! The only downside I’ve found to the app is that you can’t use discount codes yet. I’m hopeful that they’ll make that available in upcoming updates, because then this app would be perfect!

Before I found the square prints at mpix, I had to go to a lot of trouble to print my Instagram pictures. I had to either put several on one 8×10 sheet in photoshop and print those full sheets or move the images over individually to 4×6 or 5×7 and leave a white space to the side that I had to trim off by hand once they were printed. I rarely went to that trouble, so I rarely bothered to print any of my square iPhone photos. And often when I did print them, I’d be disappointed in the quality after all that work. But with mpix, I’ve been very pleased with both the easy of ordering and the quality of the prints. A few of them are grainy, but that’s because they were grainy when I took them. For most of them, you can’t even tell if they were taken with a phone or a point & shoot camera.

The last time I ordered, I decided to test the limits of iPhone prints. I ordered a few larger sized prints (8×8, 10×10, 12×12, and 20×20) and I was thrilled with the results. Can I tell that they weren’t high-resolution images? Yes. But is the quality still outstanding? Very much so. It’s hard to really tell here, but look at how these turned out. That bottom image is a 20×20 print. (I did not lay all the prints out on top of my sleeping baby for a size comparison like Marshall thought I did when he first saw the picture on the left. Haha!)

That’s what a 20×20 iphone print looks like hanging above a little kid bed. I’m still trying to decide what to put around it. I’m thinking an oversized frame with a little space around it like my friend Kat did at her house. But that’s beside the point. Look at how clear that is. And I took it with an iPhone!.

I say all that to say this: I love mpix and I want you to love them, too!  I have two $25 gift codes for a couple of my readers and a 25% off (prints only) discount code for everyone! There are several ways to enter and you can see that below. If you want to go ahead and get 25% of your prints just use the code IVEY2513 between now and June 26th!

You’ll have 5 possible ways to enter, but you must do the first one for the others to count. Each entry must be in a separate comment. The giveaway will run until 11:59pm EST on June 30th.

Mandatory Entry:

• To enter you must leave one comment (not on Facebook but in the comment section below) letting me know which camera you use most often: a real camera or your phone.

Additional Entries (must be entered separately to count):

• Share about this giveaway on Facebook and leave your status url in the comments below. (Not sure how? Click here.)
• “Like” Mpix on Facebook and then leave a comment below letting me know that you did.
• Follow Mpix on Twitter and then leave a comment below letting me know that you did.
• Follow Mpix on Pinterest and then leave a comment below letting me know that you did.

Winners will be chosen using Random.org and will be notified by email. If winner does not respond within 24 hours, a new winner will be chosen.