Mike DelGaudio

A few months back I posted how easy it is to create a photo book using the Blurb Booksmart software.

I ordered a few copies of this book from Blurb for myself and for relatives, and wanted to show you what the delivered book looks like so you can get a sense of the quality of the book.

The books arrived packaged in a cardboard box that and each book is individually shrink wrapped. This is a nice touch so that your fingerprints don’t get all over the cover before you give the gift.

This book was pretty thick at nearly 200 pages. As we saw in the pricing showdown for a variety of photobook makers, a book of this size is very reasonably priced with Blurb.

Blurb Hardcovers come with a full color, full bleed dust cover. There are many different layouts, I happened to like the full bleed. You can have full page images on the front and back cover as well as on the inside flaps. This I tried to capture the gloss on the dustcover by showing you the reflectivity of the lights.

The Hardcover is cased with linen, and the pages appear glued into the binding. I can’t find any evidence of stitching on the pages or binding.

As of this writing, blurb does not imprint anything on the linen or spine.

The inside cover of the book is white; you’ll note that there is linen near the spine, which is finished with a glued white sheet of heavy paper on the actual cover. I have been satisfied so far with the quality and durability of the spine. We’ll see what happens in 50 years to see if the adhesive on the spine holds.

Inside, the photos are printed on heavy, glossy paper. The pages feel thicker and glossier than in most books, but certainly not as heavy as actual photo paper. The page weight is consistent with other art / coffee table books I own.

Held at a distance of 12 inches, there are no discernible “dots” in the printing. As you peer in closely you can make out the pattern of the dots that create the image. In comparison to magazine quality, or dust-jackets of “real-bookstore-books” the quality is on par, if only the tiniest bit more coarse. I’ve tried to create an enlargement here so you can see the pattern. This enlargement is a box roughly 5 millimeters on a side in the actual book. Note that the fine detail is preserved.

I learned from the Cool Tools website that Blurb uses the HP Indigo 50000, which according to HP achieves a quality of “812×1624 dpi when printing in high resolution mode” Citation.

Overall, I find the quality of the Blurb product quite impressive, and that is why I am a repeat customer. You can feel comfortable that you’ll get a quality product that showcases your photos.

That said, I agree with the assessment on Cool Tools. In short, bad photos will look bad in higher resolution. Blurry photos, out of focus images, scans of ink-jet-printer prints, scans of old 110 prints, overly-compressed jpgs, all will show less detail than a sharp-direct from digital images. Bear this in mind when you create your book. I have been supremely happy with the images from my 4.0 and 6.1 mega pixel cameras that appear in my Blurb BooksDon’t blame blurb if your source images can’t hold up to such high resolution printing.

[tags] photobook, blurb, booksmart, photo book[/tags]