DPP Saddle Stitched Booklet Test

The Digital Print Partnership offer a simple to use service in which you can pick everything from paper size and thickness to lamination and paper coating in order to give you the exact product that you want. Once selected it shows you an overview of all your choices and upon accepting that it asks how many pages and copies you would like. The price updates automatically upon changing either value and even tells you the cost per unit. Again this is fairly expensive for single copies but printing multiples results in much cheaper prices, for instance it is the same price to get 8 copies as it is to print 1 in the scenario shown above.Upon finalising your choices you upload your PDF to your website and you are told the exact cost involving VAT and postage and also given an estimated delivery date, this is normally within 5 days. The biggest difference between this and Newspaper Club is that instead of paying at the time of ordering they send you a monthly invoice, however you can opt to pay this at whatever point you would like. My assumption is that they use this system as their products are more geared to business style transactions and it is the most appropriate way to deal with taking money.
The overall impression fo the document is very good, cleanly cut and stapled spine, high quality images and all round strong presentation. I chose the thinnest paper as I thought it would be cheapest but in retrospect I could have gotten much higher quality paper and coating for the same price. Although the finished product looks good I feel it could be vastly improved with the previously mentioned changes. In comparison to the newspaper it is a much more practically sized document and is more substantial, furthermore it is more cost effective to get these printed either in bulk or in smaller runs and so it seems like a more viable option depending on the document. The images featured in this are a selection of photos from various wild swimming excursions throughout the summer and the layout has been matched as much as possible to that of the Paris newspaper.
Evaluation
The service offered by DPP was of a very high quality, as was the finished product, the only minor is that the paper is very thin however this was an error by myself and I would definitely invest in thicker and/or coated paper next time as it is the same price. The document is very well made and shows precision production, I would say that the overall impact is stronger than that of the newspaper and would be better for large runs and in terms of selling as a collection of photos. The only other problem is that some of them arrived with slight creased through them, but due to the nature of the packaging I am assuming that this happened during transit. I raised the issue with DPP and they assured me that they only send out goods to the highest quality and even offered a reprint and so I cannot complain about their customer service at all.