Let me start out with saying that my KINKO's is so bad we know have $1,000 in free service there.

But this is a review of KINKO's Net. So I will not go into detail about the time they lost 4 boxes of documents and sent us someones novel instead. Nor will I go into the time they said they would have a poster done on Thursday, and on Friday when I went to pick it up they had me waiting while the made it. Nor will I waste your time tell you about the time they printed most the documents correctly and then started printing page 6 first then 7 then 8 then 1 through 5.

KINO's Net

Its 7 PM on a Friday nigh and I am at work Still. Sunday we have a BIG event and the poster we created is locked in a building that won't be open until Monday. I go to word and try to create a nice graphic poster. Either my ability to use Word is limited or Word is limited so I give up and check out Kinko.com is says they can read Word Perfect files. I kill Word and open Word Perfect 8.0 Office and create the document in under 10 minutes get final approval from my boss and try to send it to the local Kinko's mentioned above.

I send the file and call to make sure they can have it done by Sunday Morning, we have had about 20 posters made their so I know they can do it in 2 days, I also know it really only takes them 45 minutes (they did it once while I was waiting since they forgot to do it in the 3 days I gave them). Turns out their PC is down and so is their KINKO.net connection. (BIG SURPRISE)

There are lots of Kinko's in New York City

I find a Kinko's near where I live call them. They help me install a program called KINKO's perfect print. Its like Adobe Acrobat and guarantees that the file will look exactly like file on your screen. (Its captures the Print output to a graphical file). After getting help on installing this program and calling to insure they received it I find they will have my poster done not in 4 hours but a mere 24 hours.

Perfect Print is not perfect

What do you do when you need a graphic and you don't have it? You steal it. The only logo's I had for my company at work were in a program called Quark. I did not have quark on my system, but I did have Quark Demo. Quark Demo doesn't allow you to save or print with out a BIG DEMO water marked on the page. Since I needed this Quark graphic I did a copy and paste directly into Word Perfect. It printed out perfectly on paper but it caused real trouble with Perfect Print. The Perfect print document was 69 megs large. Thank goodness for LAN access at work. But this file didn't print out correctly at Kinko's so I worked and worked and got the image into a useable format (GIF). After doing that the file was now a simple 73 K and worked perfectly.


USABILITY
I found the registration process on the web page long and tedious.

It uses the format at one long page with large amounts of blank space with targets and anchors.
The problem with this was I needed to send a comment and the comment was at the bottom of the page, forcing me to skip questions. Latter it made me go back and fill in these blacks. It was highly annoying.

Any ideas how I should rate them?

The poster was perfect. Its was finished in 24 hours like promised. And Perfect Print did work after a little work. Yet Kinko's net is only as good as the Kinkos you use. If your Kinko's is good then your project will come out good. If your Kinko's is horrible then you are lucky if project will be done at all. If I didn't call my Kinko's I doubt they would have told me that their Kinko's net connection is down.



Recommended: No