Alternatives to Blurb?

[poco]

I just got a book of my photos from Blurb and have to say I'm disappointed. I'd read that all POD services seem to have a problem with magenta cast in their repos and so I was prepared for that, but what I wasn't prepared for was the ragged transition of tonality/color in subtley varied scenes. Has anybody out there tried Blurb and then sought (and found) a better quality alternative?

Thanks,

-Michael

[Frank Petronio]

I got slightly magenta (under tungsten) output from my first Shared Ink book. I had already cheated by making the RGB files very slightly olive (yellow and magenta) and am trying a second version with a a stronger bias. But it isn't out of line with other places I've seen. Transitions are smoother and photo like.

Lulu has also done some really decent color printed RGB files of my B&W photos. Their problem is they are very inconsistent so you can never be sure of what you'll get.

But I try to cheat my RGB files slightly olive for all these POD places.

[David R Munson]

I am hugely excited about the future potential of POD services enabling entrepreneur-photographers to do more with their work, but the production costs are still too high and the results still too often of questionable quality and consistency for me to have anything more than guarded enthusiasm at this point. It's going to be great once this stuff hits its stride, but at least where photos are concerned, I'm not jumping for joy just yet, though I am admittedly in the process of putting out a photo book via Lulu. I've been satisfied enough with the results of a book of writings I put out through their services that I'm going to give it a try, but as others have said, the whole POD realm is still fraught with a number of issues.