Photo books are one of the best ways to display photos that you love, whether they’re your latest photographic masterpieces or sentimental mementos of your friends and family.
However, choosing the best photo books can be confusing amidst all the competition. Photobox is one of the most prolific photo finishing product providers in the market, operating in over ten countries.
While Photobox offers a wide range of photo book styles, that’s not all. You can also purchase canvas prints, wall art, calendars, mugs, cases and other photo gifts as well. We put its online photo book creator tool to the test and examined the quality of the A4 Landscape photo book that we ordered.
Specifications
Book shape: Landscape, Square,
Book size: A4, A3
Paper: Glossy 170 gsm, thicker {230 gsm), high-gloss 204 gsm
Style: Standard hardcover, lay flat, premium hardcover, Swarovski Crystal Deluxe, soft cover, love book, hexagon photo book
Extra pages: £1.98 per two pages
Shipping: Worldwide
Ease of use
Designing our Photobox photo book was pleasingly simple, with the online creator tool working seamlessly without any glitches. There’s a menu on the left that includes photos, layouts, backgrounds and borders for you to choose from for each page.
Like many of the photo book creator tools, Photobox purports to be able to design your photo book for you. You can choose whether to do this by chronological order or by file name. While it wasn’t perfect, we were pleasantly surprised by Photobox’s efforts. It grouped the images together fairly intelligently and it would have only taken a few tweaks to perfect the layout.
Quality of results
We were fairly pleased with our photo book from Photobox. The shipping was fast and the protective packaging was pleasingly substantial - in fact, this book was the best protected out of all the photo books we’ve reviewed.
The color accuracy on both the cover image and the photos inside was pretty decent, with no major complaints from us. However, we did have a few small quibbles with the quality of the book. The first is that each end of the book’s spine had a few small creases. While these wrinkles weren’t anything major, they weren’t ideal and we didn’t see them on most of the other photo books that we tested.
In addition, both the cover image and the photos printed inside the book weren’t quite as sharp as they could have been. This softness was only really noticeable upon close inspection of the book, but it would have been nice if each image had been nicely sharp.
Conclusion
While our photo book from Photobox was perfectly serviceable, we didn’t quite feel it was worth the £36.99 (plus £3.49 in shipping) we paid for this standard A4 landscape photo book. Our main gripes were with the quality of the printing, as we felt the images came out a little soft.
However, while we feel you could get better quality for a similar price point, we were overall pleased with our Photobox offering.
Read more:
• Best photo books in 2020
• Best photo printing online: top services from around the web
• Best canvas print services in 2020
• Best photo albums in 2020
