Certainly not the same quality as photo prints. It’s a different process which will struggle with subtle light tones. On the other end, there was no evidence of dots in dark areas where black IS black.
The printing quality is on par with entry-level 4-ink printers on a good glossy paper. It’s a little grainy.
Let’s have a detailed look (click on the screenshots)
Here is my review of my first photo book ordered at blurb.com
I’ve finally ordered a 160 pages photo book and I’m rather pleased with the result. For less than 50$ (with shipping to US), it’s OK.
1. Binding
It’s rather good. Of course, if you fully-open the book, there is this little “cracking” but it seems resistant. Pages don’t seem to want to fly away.
2, 3 Closeup
With CMYK ink printing like this, a closeup examination will reveal some dots. Don’t worry! You won’t noticed them much when browsing the book.
4. Compression
No matter how good your images are, Blurb’s software recompresses them to JPEG around ~9 (on 12) quality. I was very worried about this because the lossy JPEG compression introduces artefacts, especially on red tones. To my own surprise, since the printing is grainy, there wasn’t much problems with that.
5. Artefacts?
Texts weren’t producing much artefacts either. There *are* some artefacts but that’s really on tight closeup that you can see them. Still, avoid small texts on JPEGs if you can.
Conclusion
Colors fidelity: 5/5. Colors are very good. Not too dark, no wrong colorcast, this is a VERY pleasant surprise. Really, kudos to Blurb - labs who know me can tell you how much I care about it
Perfect colors and luminosity all the way.Grainless photo printing: 3/5 Grain is a little high, but if you don’t bother it should be OK. You know how perfectionist I am: if I say it’s OK, then it’s really OK
It should be perfectly good for BW prints for instance.Compression and artefacts: 4/5 Images are a little soft but I’ve got to admit that the compression matches the printing quality.
Light tones rendering: 3/5 Light skin tones can become unfortunately quite grainy. This should be improved. I could give a lower rate but since it only happens on less than 10 pages over 160, I wouldn’t say it’s too common.
Finishing: 5/5 The book looks solid and nice.
Software: 2/5 The software feel rather amateurish, I would much prefer to upload my own PDF. But at least, it didn’t crashed
Overall impression on clients and friends: 5/5 I’ve tested it and both were quite excited and impressed by the book. To me, it’s not as good as photo prints but it was worth it (for the price).
For the moment, it’s the best book offer I’ve seen for the price.
