Man, I’m glad to see this because I thought I was crazy. Or just have a really low bar for photos (possible).I've pre-ordered for every cruise (and my upcoming) and I've been very happy. Are they the best photos ever taken - no. I'd compare them to school picture quality - fine for the number of people getting through the line - same as the park photos. The lighting is much better than most taken with my phone (which I would guess they plan on purpose), especially the photos taken in darker areas. And I have gotten a handful of REALLY great ones over three cruises.
We see A LOT of characters. There's also a bit of...if the photographers see you a lot, they know the photos are important to you, so they take more, and more interesting shots. I've actually had photographers seek me out because they know we like the photos. I would say 90% of our photos (in the hundreds, even for a 5 day cruise) are character photos. We only do the background ones if there are no (or very short) lines.
I make a photobook of all my cruises so I know I will do something with the pictures. I don't love the borders like others have said, but I've always found a way to crop them to make it work (either with or without the border).
If, for whatever reason, I didn't like the pics, I'd have no problem cancelling so it seems a no-brainer to not pre-order if I'm considering. Would I do it for a 3/4 day cruise on one of the larger ships? Maybe not.
We pre-ordered the photo package on the Fantasy a couple of weeks ago and I am SO happy with the pictures. We got over 400 photos and there are very few “bad” shots. And the lighting and quality is much better than the ones taken with our phones. In fact, I struggled to decide which ones to get prints of to display, and which to include in our photo book, because we have so many good ones. But we did a ton of character meets and some of the backdrop ones, so we definitely did seek them out and see the same photogs over and over again throughout the week.
Anyway, I love the photo package and we plan to do it on our next one as well.