Way back in the early days of digital photography—five years ago, in other words—the photo industry had a term for all the steps necessary to get prints from your digital pictures. They called it the "chain of pain."

Things aren't that bad anymore, thanks in part to the proliferation of online printing and photo sharing web sites. All offer free memberships and a basic set of by now familiar services. Using your web browser, you upload your digital pictures to their servers. (Most sites can also develop your film, digitize it, and upload the images.) Your photos are organized into online albums, which you can invite friends and family to view. And you and your invited guests can order true photographic prints from those albums, which the web site will mail to any address.

We tested ten leading online printing outfits. We ran each web site through its paces, sent questions to customer service, and ordered prints from a selection of images that included colorful subjects, a variety of skin tones, and several tough "problem" images that were badly exposed or heavily tinted from the wrong white balance setting.

Every site we tested was at least adequately easy to use. Better yet, print quality scores were good virtually across the board, though we judged Fujifilm.net the quality champ. The biggest variation we found, in fact, was pricing, so keep your eye on the bottom line.

Ofoto (www.ofoto.com) -

One of online photo printing's pioneers, Ofoto was acquired by Kodak almost two years ago. With that pedigree, it's no surprise that Ofoto is a full-featured, highly polished service. Every task from uploading photos to ordering prints is clearly labeled, and the well-designed site walks you through each process in clear and simple steps. Several online editing tools are at your disposal, including red-eye removal and a Photoshop-like cropping tool that's one of the best we've seen. Ofoto also sells dozens of frame and greeting card styles, and you can quickly preview your picture in any one of them, a great feature.

You can make prints from 4 x 6 to 20 x 30 inches, a wider range than many sites offer. Overall, our test prints were very good, with vivid colors and excellent skin tones. The big exception: Ofoto did a lousy job correcting our problem images. At $.49 for a 4 x 6 and $3.99 for an 8 x 10, Ofoto's prints are also on the pricey side, but you get a very well designed web site and generally excellent prints for your money.

Fujifilm.net (www.fujifilm.net) -

Photo giant Fuji's online printing arm, Fujifilm.net, isn't polished to quite the same gleam as Ofoto, but the quality of its prints is outstanding. The web site is uncluttered and well labeled, but navigating the site, while no great chore, is occasionally frustrating. To see a thumbnail view of all the images in an album, for example, takes too many clicks, and individual images are displayed a bit too small. The online help is extensive and clearly written, but when we e-mailed three questions to customer service we got a canned answer offering to reprint any pictures we didn't like, rather than addressing our specific queries.

Available print sizes are a bit limited—8 x 10 is the largest—but Fujifilm.net's prints were the best in our tests, if just by a nose. Colors were quite vivid and skin tones were pleasing. Alone among the sites we tested, Fujifilm.net also did a good job correcting our bad exposures and crummy white balance. Probably not coincidentally, Fujifilm.net's prices—$.49 for a 4 x 6 and $4.29 for an 8 x 10—are also the highest overall in our test group.

Walmart.com (www.walmart.com) -

Walmart.com's Photo Center offers great prices through a functional but no-frills web site. It's easy to manage your online albums, share them with friends and family, and order prints. But small irritations crop up here and there. The shopping cart, for example, doesn't display thumbnails of your images, so you have to remember file names to know what pictures you're about to print. And the online help, though clearly written, just barely covers the basics.

Still, at $.26 for a 4 x 6 and $2.89 for an 8 x 10, Walmart.com's prices are hard to beat, and you can have your print order delivered to your local Wal-Mart store for pickup if you'd like to save shipping costs. Despite their low cost, our test prints were top-notch, which came as no surprise when we learned that Walmart.com's orders are actually printed by the same Fujicolor Processing labs that print Fujifilm.net's orders. Indeed, our Walmart.com test prints were nearly identical to Fujifilm.net prints with one major exception. The "problem" shots that Fuji did such a good job fixing went completely uncorrected when printed through Walmart.com. Neither Wal-Mart nor Fuji would comment on this, but one possibility is that Fujifilm.net's much more expensive prints go through a more rigorous quality control check.

Trigger-happy shooters will love dotPhoto's low regular prices and its many discount plans. Standard prices start at $.29 for 4 x 6s and $2.95 for 8 x 10s, and dotPhoto will make prints in an unusually wide range of sizes, including 3.5 x 5, 11 x 14, and even 12 x 18. The company also offers seven different monthly subscription plans and eleven pre-paid bulk print packages, which can drop your print costs below $.20 for 4 x 6s and under $2.00 for 8 x 10s. You can even sell prints of your images using dotPhoto as an e-commerce platform. You set the price; dotPhoto handles the printing and billing, takes a commission, and sends you a check at the end of the month.

Despite their low cost, our dotPhoto test prints were equal in overall quality to those from nearly all the sites we tested, and the company did the second-best job of fixing our problem images. The web site is rougher around the edges than Ofoto and Shutterfly. There are no image editing or enhancing tools, and the online help consists mainly of an unindexed, five-page FAQ, which isn't much fun to slog through. In short, dotPhoto isn't exactly pretty or refined, but it delivers good prints at very affordable prices.

Shutterfly combines the clean, well-designed web site of an industry veteran with good support for more advanced photographers and enticing bulk print discount prices. Though not quite up to Ofoto's standard, the site is generally a pleasure to use, and an excellent preview function lets you quickly see how images will look at any print size. We were also impressed with the exceptionally nice album view and slide show that your friends and family will see when you invite them to check out your shared albums.

Our Shutterfly test prints were among the best. They show rich, accurate colors and some corrections appear to have been applied to our "problem" images, though they weren't very effective. If you're a tweaker who likes to fine tune your pictures in Photoshop, note that Shutterfly gives you the option of printing without the automatic image "enhancements" like sharpening and auto contrast adjustment that all of these services normally apply by default. At $.49 for a 4 x 6 and $3.99 for an 8 x 10, Shutterfly's prices are high-end, but the company offers pre-paid bulk print purchase plans that can reduce your costs to $.29 per 4 x 6.

Club Photo's web site is easy to use, and it displays your images larger than most other sites whether you're looking at thumbnails of your whole album or at individual photos. The site also offers an unusually long list of novelty photo gifts, including pencil sketches and oil paintings made by hand from your images.

Prints are available at mid-range prices in a wide variety of sizes up to 24 x 36 inches. We were happy with the color and skin tones in our test prints and give Club Photo good marks for overall print quality.

Printroom will please many advanced shooters with a wide selection of print sizes up to 20 x 30 inches, the option to have your prints made on glossy or matte surface paper (many sites offer glossy only), and, like Shutterfly, the ability to turn automatic image enhancements off.

The site itself looks good and works reasonably well, though sometimes a bit slowly. Our test prints were well exposed with rich colors. Happily, Printroom's good quality prints and extra flexibility are available at mid-range prices—$.39 for a 4 x6 and $2.99 for an 8 x 10.

We found the ez prints web site somewhat confusing and a bit slow to load, but it turns out to be fairly flexible. You can order prints in glossy or matte surface in sizes from 3.5 x 5 to 20 x 24 inches, and individually address them to different delivery locations. The company's prices are mid-range overall.

The ez prints site displays unusually large thumbnails and individual image views, which makes for the best online image quality we saw. Our test prints, however, were mediocre. Color accuracy and richness were good, but many of our shots were printed a bit too dark.

Though it offers some uncommon features, including very flexible image sorting and several thumbnail sizes, the PhotoAccess web site struck us as overly complex and unintuitive. It was also quite slow in our tests. On the plus side, the site's individual image view is the only one that rivals ez prints for size and clarity.

Though we noted some minor skin tone problems, our test prints showed accurate, saturated colors and scored well overall. At $.45 for a 4 x 6 and $3.49 for an 8 x 10, PhotoAccess's prices are nudging the high end of the scale.

Its puzzling name aside, Snapfish strikes a nice balance of functional web site design, good print quality, and flexible pricing. We especially liked the site's excellent print preview, which shows exactly how your image will be cropped for printing, and the clear and well-organized user account page that shows your credits, orders, and account information. Unlike most sites, Snapfish will let you upload TIFF, GIF, and BMP images in addition to JPEGs.

Snapfish's print quality ranked among the best in our tests. Standard print prices are a bit on the high side—$.39 per 4x6 and $3.79 per 8 x 10—but you can buy pre-paid bulk print packages that reduce your costs as low as $.25 per 4x6.

With excellent color inkjet printers selling everywhere for $100 or less, you might wonder who needs online photofinishing. You may need it, and here's why:

Save time - Inkjets are great for making a quick print or two, but printing 30 4 x 6 photos of your last office party one-by-one on an inkjet could easily take two hours. There are better ways to squander your youth. On any of the web sites we tested, uploading 30 typical digital images and ordering a 4 x 6 of each takes less than ten minutes.

Save the hassle - If clients, colleagues, grandmothers in Florida, or fellow bachelor party attendees might want copies of your pictures, you'll be glad you put them online. Send interested parties an e-mail with a link to your album. They can order the prints themselves and have them mailed to their own homes, saving you all those trips back and forth to the lab and the post office.

Save your memories - Standard inkjet prints can fade fast—often in less than five years. Online photofinishers use the same traditional photographic process used by regular film photofinishers. Treated properly, their prints should last for twenty years or more without fading.

Open up your new digital camera and there's a flyer touting the camera manufacturer's online printing service. Windows XP has an online photo printing wizard. AOL says you've got pictures, and, oh by the way, we can print them for you. It seems like everybody's got an online printing lab. Or do they?

The actual printing for Sony's ImageStation site, it turns out, is done by Ofoto. Prints ordered through the Instant Share system built into Hewlett-Packard's cameras are made by Shutterfly. Windows XP's online printing wizard sends you to your choice of Shutterfly, Ofoto, or Print@FUJICOLOR, which is yet another brand name for the Fujicolor Processing labs behind Fujifilm.net. Those labs also print orders for ritzPix.com, PrintAtWolf.com, and several others. Not to be outdone, Kodak has a subsidiary called Qualex, which prints AOL's You've Got Pictures print orders.