Review: Saal Digital Fotoservice

Within a year of visiting Egypt at the start of my travels in 2007, I decided to start producing photo books that would remind me of the trips. After reviewing what was available at the time the one I went for was Blurb as their BookSmart software was easy to use, even if it was a bit buggy. In fact it crashes quite often and there are certain actions that will break the design, but they can be worked around. What mattered most was the quality of the final product.

Almost ten years have now passed, and I’ve stuck with that same software even though other companies have started to produce similar products in that time. That is until I got the chance to review Saal Digital Fotoservice’s photo booklets. In the interest of transparency, this was something I was able to do more or less as a free sample. I don’t believe in letting this bias results of a test though so I was determined I’d be as scientific about this as possible, and to split the testing in two:

1. Software
2. The photo booklet

Each of these will be broken down into different aspects. As I didn’t have a new book to produce at the time, I decided to pick a few of my favourite photographs that use different ranges of colours, and to make sure I also included some text. This would help in the second stage — testing the print quality.

Software

So what matters about software?

1. Ease of use,
2. Stability,
3. and to a degree, the available features.

You can argue that features don’t matter — but it can be the nicest application in the world, but if it doesn’t do what you need it to, this matters. With this application you can design the following types of product:

• Photo prints,
• Photo book,
• Wall decors,
• Cards,
• Posters,
• Calendars,
• Mugs,
• etc.

It’s quite a range of possible products you can create which means it must have quite a number of different templates in order to know the required dimensions, etc. for each one. For the purpose of this test I went with a photo book which has the following options:

• Hardcover photo book,
• Extra thick hardcover photo book,
• Softcover photo book,
• Gift box,
• Photo booklet

For this I had a £20 voucher to use against a photo booklet — the ring bound option, so went with that. This took me on to the next part of the wizard where I can select the number of pages to start with, the format, the orientation, and the printing surface. As these options are changed it will automatically update the price so you can see what difference your choices make before you even start. That’s a handy feature to have that makes it nice and easy to know what you’ll be spending. This moves me on to what it’s like to use for designing your product.

Ease of use and Features

Desktop publishing software often have the same look and feel to them, though as more effort goes into user research they are starting to improve. With Saal’s offering they’ve gone for a similar sort of feel to Microsoft Publisher — it feels technical and precise though some of the positioning of elements isn’t as smooth as it could be. At least at first glance.

To start with I tried using the application in the same way I used Booksmart — I dragged and dropped photos from Explorer to where I want them and then drag them around. If you drag and drop that way with Saal, then it’ll become a background image for the page.

Saal Design Software

Very quickly I realised that a lot of the power in this application is in the features of the ribbon at the top of the page. This is contextually sensitive to what you’re working on so you don’t have to worry about a cluttered interface. It becomes quite intuitive to use.

I mentioned positioning earlier, and that is something you’ve got quite a few options for. You can automatically align elements on the page, or together as part of a two-page spread. In fact, this application is all about creating a two-page spread, not individual pages. When you add a new page, you’re adding a spread. I think this makes a lot of sense, though in my time using the application I didn’t really find a quick way to move things from one page to another if I thought two different pages paired better. My solution was to select all the elements on the page and then cut and paste onto a new one.

The layouts of pages can either be designed by yourself on the fly, or you can use one of the photo layouts that they provide with the ability to still modify them. Beyond image boxes, you can also add text boxes to the page which allow you to choose from a very specific set of fonts.

Stability and Performance

Unlike other design applications I’ve used, this one hasn’t crashed whilst I’ve used it. It seems a very stable application, and running on a Windows 10 PC with 32Gb of RAM it also performs perfectly well. Normally I’d have more to say here, but I had no issues whatsoever.

Photo Booklet

When it comes to reviewing printing, I’ve had some experience with this. Before my current job I worked at a place that specialised in printing and got involved in the testing of ink, paper, and printers. Each of these by themselves can play a big part in the quality of the print, as does the method of printing. Being able to demonstrate this is what helped to sell the products.

The books I’ve had printed previously have had a number of quality issues. Although I often find that with Blurb that the dust jacket is folded incorrectly it’s not the only observation. The print quality is something I’d considered “acceptable”, but in all honesty it’s not always great. I always go for their most premium paper, but sometimes I’ll notice page after page has issue with banding in the colours, or a fine grain — even on quarter page photos. This sort of issue is what I’d want to look out for in testing Saal’s photo booklets.

What I’ve done for this test is to completely ignore any design element and to focus on creating a booklet that puts their print process through it’s paces to see what it is and isn’t capable of. To do this I’ve considered the following as parts of a portfolio:

• Full page photograph (colour)
• Full page photograph (monochrome)
• Full page photograph (dark)
• Two-page spread with gradually changing colours and a good mixture of colour
• Pages with text of different size, style, and colour
• Page with photo and text
• Full page macro photograph (colour)

Between these I felt it’d cover most cases that I might use their service for in the future.

The photo booklet itself has a matte protective cover on the front and back, and is ring bound. At first I was unsure about the ring binding, but I think it’s a style that could grow on me for smaller projects. This style also has the advantage of not only being able to lay it flat, but also being able to fold the pages back to take up less space when viewing.

The pages were printed on good quality photographic paper (I’d estimate around 210 gsm — but I could be wrong), using a six colour printing process to help get good colour definition.

To start with I flicked through the booklet to get a general feel for it. My first impression was amazement at how closely the colours resembled the originals. I also couldn’t spot any immediate issues with the print quality either.

I then had a second look concentrating more on each page. At a normal viewing distance the print quality was better than I’d ever seen from a “one off” production. It was certainly better than those I’d had printed before.

Even when getting my eyes close to the page, the only imperfections was in the texture of the paper. This is normal and something you’ll see in “off the shelf” books too. Incredible.

I compared the full page colour photo to the ones that were monochrome, and couldn’t fault the printing quality. Even on the full page macro photo I could still pick out all of the detail — nothing had been lost. It didn’t even matter whether I’d chosen a dark photograph, a light photograph, or one that was in between — they all performed brilliantly.

The only case where I could see anything in the printing process was where I’d got a photo that was mostly sky — I could seem some slight banding in this when looking closely. It wasn’t in the same direction as the colour change though so may have been a one-off as on another photo with a similar composition there was no banding to be seen.

I then checked out cases where I thought there was a bigger chance of them being tripped up. On my first page I split a photo to fit just over the width of one page, and then added some text. I wanted to see if the excess would still get printed, and if it’d line up correctly. It was pleasing to see they’d succeeded at both perfectly.

The text is crisp, and wasn’t affected by size or colour — even when printed over an image. The only thing left I could try to trip them up on was using a background image in the application as a two-page spread.

Again the alignment of the image across the pages was perfect, and none of the image had been missed out. When I’ve tried two-page spreads in the past it’s been with a photobook and the binding has meant that some of the image can’t be seen. At least not without the risk of damaging the binding — this is where this type of binding works, though I’m aware they also do “lay flat” style binding for their hardcover photo books as well.

I have to say I was impressed with the quality. I even passed the book around the office for a few colleagues to see, those that had seen my previous books, and they were amazed by the printing quality also.

Pricing

As I said before, I wanted this to be a fair and unbiased test so I made sure that even though I’d been given a £20 voucher for this, that I was also paying some more on top of this. What I created was 36 pages of 21 x 30, and I paid an additional £6.55 on top of the voucher, and then £4.95 for their standard shipping.

The cheapest photo booklet you can get would be £4.95 + shipping for 16 pages of 10 x 15 with a matte surface. This goes all the way up to 80 pages of 30 x 42 for £85.95 + shipping. These are for single copies, but they do offer price points for bulk purchases.

It’s difficult to compare this to others, as Saal are the only ones I know that produce the ring-bound option. For a better comparison consider that with Blurb you can get a 25 x 20 photo book with a hardcover and 26 pages of their best photo paper for £42.39. This is with a 25% fee for removing their logo from the book. The equivalent from Saal would be £39.95 — this includes the option to remove the barcode.

So Saal just wins out on price as well.

The Verdict

I’m pleasantly surprised by the quality of the end product. I hadn’t expected the prints to be as good as they were, and I think it’s something which will lead me to create my future travel photo books through Saal instead.

I often hear “you get what you pay for”, though in this case I find it amazing that the slightly cheaper option is actually of better quality. They’re faster too — I placed the order for my book late into the evening of the 13th August and received it by midday on the 17th August. For a “one off” product with international shipping, that’s an impressive turnaround.

I look forward to trying out more of their printing in future. At the time of writing they have a number of vouchers for trying out different products — so I’d recommend giving them a try! http://www.saal-digital.co.uk/

If you’re interested in reading about the travels I mentioned, please check out: https://medium.com/@jedi58/wandering-the-world-part-1-18b7a4febbed