We've had plantation shutters in our last 3 homes. Always bought them at Home Depot (mine are the faux white wood mind you) and we've installed twice ourselves, but this last time, HD was offereing free install with the purchase of at least 4 blinds and since we needed 23 blinds for 23 windows, it was a bargain. Heck, even the $150 usual installation fee would have been worth paying. BTW - I prefer the looks of HD's faux blinds over Lowe's.
Install is not hard, but it's time consuming and DH's back was always killing him by the time he finished. The hardest part of the whole thing was taking out the extra "slats" from the bottom and "restringing" the pully thingy (for lack of better terms).
When we decided to have HD install the ones we have now (this was June 2009), I just went into the store and picked out the style of blind I wanted, paid the $35/40 fee and they sent a subcontractor out to take all the measurements for my windows. Once she submitted those to HD, they pulled all the sizes I needed, I went to the store and paid for them and then anther sub (which happened to be the husband and son of the lady who measured) came out and installed them. They had all 23 windows done in under 2 hours. Well worth having someone else do them and we haven't had issues with any of them.
