Why are digital prints poor quality when you pick them up at the store (even with high res/quality camera)?

Eg. buying from Osco photo center.

And is there a good place to get high quality digital prints of my photos?

the why is complicated. even though your camera may be high res it most likely saves the images as jpegs. jpeg is a compression format. any time you compress you lose information and quality. you need to get a camera that can save images in raw format. it is a non-destructive file format--meaning no pixel information is destroyed.
secondly, most places that make digital prints are not concerned with quality--only speed. so there printers are not of the highest quality.
if you're serious about high quality prints get a camera that can save in raw format and invest in a nice photo printer. if you're printing small (no larger than 8 x 10 ) you can probably get a nice printer for under $500. canon and epson are the best.
oh, and as far as sending your stuff out to be printed you need to send it to an actual print shop. some place that specializes in phto printing. the drug store type photo places are never going to give you the quality you want.
good luck

No, they will actually look they way they would on the Computer and not really any different then a disposible camera, actually better

A photographer friend told me her photos were looking very poor and hung around to watch the developers do her film. They were printing her digital photos from her camera (at a lower resolution than she had taken them), then scanning the prints and placing them on a disc to give to her! I swear. The lint on the glass of the scanner was clearly evident. This was beyond stupid! She found this happening in several places. (Evidently, this is how they were used to turning film pics into digital files.)
I finally was able to show her how to download her files from her camera herself and she got a top of the line laser printer and good photo paper and is much happier with her photo quality.

I've had the same problem and have started ordering my photos off the internet, I like the one affiliated with Kodak, I believe it's called ofoto. There are lots of others, since they specialize in digital prints the photos usually come out great, it's fairly resonably priced and ya can't beat getting them mailed to home, for me, huge time saver!

first of all i have a degree in photography, sold cameras and worked in one hour photo labs for years. so in my opinion if your a serious photographer then yes you need a camera to save in raw format. but if your not then no you don't need that option. if your saving your pics in the highest resolution possible in your camera and its at least a 2 MP camera or higher then you should be able to get photo quality pictures in a 4x6.

there are several things it could be.it could be the MP of your camera and what size pictures your making.maybe your trying to make too big of a picture for the size file you have. also are the pictures properly taken and good quality to begin with. do they look good on your computer to begin with? if so then that eliminates that question.

also have you tried other photo labs. i take pictures of my daughter girl scout functions with my little 2.3 MP Nikon and send them to target.com and have no problems. sometimes the colors off so i take em back and tell them how to correct them because most of the kids working at one hour photos just know how to push enter not how to color correct. not knowing or seeing the pic's your talking about its hard to say. it could be a bad print job. printed at a very low quality like another person answered about her friend or just printed to dark to light or off color.

those are my words of wisdom. take em or leave em. lol.