AllPosters.com

Full review
I recently moved into a university residence and not so surprisingly, the room wasn’t in the greatest shape. After a few weeks of settling in and trying my best to make the space more cozy and personal, I was getting pretty tired of looking at the scratched up, stained walls. I concluded that some strategically placed posters would be the easiest and most economical way to dress up the shabby mint green paint. Numerous trips to the mall only turned up a meager selection, mostly consisting of cheesy Hilary Duff portraits and those horrible Anne Geddes creations. I turned to the internet in search of more choices to better suit my tastes, and found allposters.com.

Allposters.com claims to be “The World’s Largest Poster & Print Store.” After spending an entire week surfing through the site – which carries everything from classic movie posters, to Monet prints, to black and white photography, to reproductions of Rolling Stone magazine covers -- I don’t have any doubt that even if there could be some other site with more, you would never have the need or the time to browse through it all.

If you purchase a poster or a print, you can also choose have it matted, framed, or both. However, it does get quite expensive, as the framing is considered to be custom, and there will be additional shipping charges for both the size and the weight of a framed piece. Ordinary posters or prints ship cheaply in a sturdy cardboard tube, so it may be wise to have them delivered this way and take them to your local framer instead. The quality will be much better, and the expense would be negated by the much lower cost of shipping. Another option would be to order prints in a standard size and purchase ready-made frames at an even lower cost.

In addition to posters and prints, which are categorized under Movies, Music, Sports, College, Vintage, Photography, Fine Art, and Best Sellers, allposters.com also sells calendars, apparel, canvas art, outdoor art, magnets, standups, wall decals, wall signs, and wall tapestries.

If you are just browsing, it’s easy to navigate the enormous selection by category and subcategory. Each page displays the category’s best sellers first, with the least popular choices and framed pieces displayed last. However, I wish there was a way to narrow your choices within a certain category, for example, if I wanted to see impressionist prints for under $30. There is a search function that works fairly well, but I noticed that if you use “impressionist” or “impressionism” as keywords even without restricting any of the other qualities (such as size and price), you get a significantly smaller number of results than by simply clicking the subcategory for Impressionism.

When you see a poster you like, clicking on the poster will take you to a page with a bigger image of the poster and more details. If the poster is available in different sizes, the options will also be displayed here. Some pages allow you to enlarge the image even more so you can get a very close look at what you’re buying. Beneath the listing are recommendations for other posters you might be interested in. Be careful when you are shopping for a popular image, because there may be several versions that differ in quality, color, and the presence or absence of a border. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that they’re all the same!

For example, I was interested in a poster of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night on the Rhone.” I went through each and every version, blowing up the image where I could to see the details, and finally settled on the version that (according to the image) had no borders, and seemed to have the richest, most accurate reproduction of the colors on the original painting. I’ll discuss my satisfaction with this choice in just a bit. If you choose an image with borders, the poster dimensions may be misleading – a 90cm x 60cm poster may only have an image that is 70cm x 40cm floating in white space.

The ordering process is fairly standard, but there was one very sneaky thing that almost caught me off-guard, and reduced my trust in this company. During check-out, there was a little blurb that promised a free gift with my purchase. On the last page, it turns out that my “free gift” was actually a free membership to some online club offering discounts and coupons. I read the fine print and was somewhat miffed to find that after a period of time, the membership would no longer be free, and you would be automatically billed for each subsequent month if you didn’t cancel your membership. You had to be very careful to leave the box that signs you up for this membership UNCHECKED, especially since you already gave the site your account information in order to make your purchase.

Also, make sure you input a discount code in the designated box in order to get a percentage off the price of your purchase. Allposters.com always has some kind of deal going, and you’d be foolish to make any purchase with less than a 20% discount. As we speak, they are offering 25% off any purchase. If you can’t find the discount code on the allposters.com home page (you often have to click on a little pop-up to access it), just google “allposters.com coupon” to find several websites that will provide the coupon code.

I chose standard shipping, and because I live in Canada, it cost about $10 to ship two posters, and it was a two week wait. I was very excited when I received my cardboard tube, and after undoing a generous amount of packing tape, I popped off the end and pulled out my posters. They were very curly after being in the tube for such a long time, but I was glad to see that there were no kinks or creases, and the edges were not torn or frayed. My Van Gogh poster was advertised as an “art print” and while it’s not exactly museum quality, it’s printed on much heavier, stiffer paper than a regular poster, and well worth the $17 that it cost. The image quality is excellent, and up close I can see the brush strokes, albeit in two dimensions instead of three. The colors are also very rich.

I also ordered a Gustav Klimpt poster, advertised as a “detail” from one of his paintings of flowers in a garden. This meant that part of the original photograph of the painting had to be blown up in order to create a poster of that size. While the colors of the image on the web page were extremely vivid, the image on the poster was a bit washed out and blurry. It goes to show that when you’re looking at a very shrunken down image of anything, you can’t be too sure. It wasn’t awful, just a bit disappointing, especially since this one much smaller, was printed on regular paper and cost $11.

After laying the posters out on the floor and stacking books on the corners, they were sufficiently flattened out to hang on my walls, and they made a huge difference in my room. I kept the cardboard shipping tube so that when I move, I’ll have a safe way of transporting my posters.

All in all, I’m quite satisfied with my purchase, and I would shop on allposters.com again.