Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

Product Category: Photo book

Where to Buy: Photobook Canada

Price: $127.78 CAD as configured with the 216gsm Premium Silk/Gloss paper (prices start at $110 CAD for a 40 page book 11" x 11" book)

Pros:

• Incredible paper quality with the upgraded paper option;
• Impressive print quality on the cover and inside pages;
• Reasonably easy to use software.

Cons:

• Severe accuracy problems with front and back cover images;
• Tech support is somewhat lacking;
• Expensive, even with a discount coupon.

Summary: If you read my photo book review round up, you'll know that Photobook Canada fared quite well; with their upgraded paper option, the paper was superb, and the print and cover quality were excellent. At the time, they didn't support spine printing, and I further docked marks because the image on the back was printed right at the edge of the cover - but I was nevertheless impressed with the final product. Within a few weeks of my review going live, Photobook Canada launched version 5.0 of their photo book software, and guess what missing feature it added? Spine printing! Read more...

Looking to print a photo book, and want to save some money on it? After I published my photo book review article, I contacted each of the companies involved and asked them if they'd like to provide discount coupons for my readers. A few agreed to, so here are the discounts I've collected so far:

• Treasure-Book: DHTDC15 will get you 15% off your order, valid until June 30th, 2010.
• Inkubook: HOMEFREE10 will get you a buy one, get one free promotion. This coupon is limited to one per customer, and is valid until October 31st, 2010.
• ArtsCow: 30PBOOK1199 will get you an 8" x 8" photo book, 30 pages in length, for $11.99 each, with free shipping (expires December 31st, 2011). 30PBOOK2499 will get you a 12" x 12" photo book, 30 pages in length, for $24.99 each, with free shipping (expires December 31st, 2011).
• Photobook Canada: until October 31st, you can get 45% off your entire order (not including shipping and taxes) using the coupon code DIGITAL45.

This review has been updated as of July 2014. Short on time? Skip to the conclusion, or do what I do: sign up for discounts from Photobook America and MyPublisher. Both are superb choices!

Looking for the 20% discount on FotoFusion? Use code DHT20-2 on the Lumapix site.

My son Logan was born on August 16th, 2009, but long before that I started work on a very special project: a baby book that would chronicle the process of my wife's pregnancy, our preparations for his arrival, and the first couple of weeks after he was born. This wasn't going to simply be a bunch of photos; I wanted to create a truly epic baby book, something that was off-the-charts unique and something that would become a family treasure.

I've wanted to use FotoFusion (see below for a discount coupon) to create customized page layouts for a long time now, because I knew it would allow me to break the limited confines of what typical photo book software permitted. I had carefully created all the pages in FotoFusion, exported each page as a high-resolution JPEG file, and dropped the images into full-page layouts. I incorporated my green-screen scanning technique to add objects to the book, and once I was finished - a process that took eight months of work and around 200 hours in total because I wanted it to be perfect - I had the book printed with Picaboo. The results were a complete disaster. The details are below under the review section for Picaboo, but the short version is that I was really unhappy with the physical representation of all my hard work and I wanted to get the books re-printed using a different service. But which service should I use?

Read more...