I received this coupon from PhotoinPress in my inbox today, so I thought that I would share:

From February 2 to February 14, 2009
Get 15% discount
on your book order
Enter Coupon Code:
FEB15

 You can see my experiences with PhotoinPress here. PhotoinPress is especially good for any Canadians out there given the exchange rate and that you don’t have to pay customs!

Note: The opinions stated here are based on my experience with each place.

Mr. Bean and I decided that part of our Christmas presents to our parents would be a photo book for each of them. Both were originally going to go with Blurb, but two things happened. First of all, someone posted on weddingbee that there was a Canadian book printing place called “Photo in Press“. This piqued my interest because they said that it was where a lot of place got their books printed and it’s Canadian (=save me money on shipping.) Second thing was for my inlaw’s book, it stopped being able to find our wedding pictures on our computer. Thus, I decided to redo their book on Photo in Press and keep my parent’s book on blurb. Thankfully my parent’s book was already complete.

Blurb:

Description: 28 page full colour hard cover book with premium quality paper. The book has a printed dust cover.

Size: 7×7 inches.

Design notes: Many flexible options for picture layouts, but layouts good for photo books seem to be limited. Allowed you to size pictures however you wanted and has designs where photos were overlapped. Blurb requires you to have a copyright page and a back page. Up to 40 pages is $22.95 USD.

Program use: Program was very easy to use, but used a lot of ram on our poor old compy.

Cost: $25.95 USD for 28 page book with premium quality paper. I found a $10 off shipping coupon online, so priority shipping to Canada was only $10.80.
Total: $36.75 USD = 45.46 CAD (boo! not nice exchange rate!)

Quality of Printing: Okay, you could tell that it wasn’t photo lab quality, though. The paper was nicer and thicker than Photo In Press though!

Shipping Time: I ordered it on November 1st. It was shipped on November 11th and arrived on November 26th.

Photo in Press:

Description: 20 page full colour hard cover book. The hard cover is black suede and has a window in it to see a picture.

Size: 8.75 x 11.25 inches

Design notes: Many flexible options for picture layouts, but they don’t allow you to fit pictures in smaller than the frame or to overlap photos. Photo in Press does not require you to have a copyright and back page, which saves 2 pages in the page total. Extra pages beyond 20 are $.99 CAD per page.

Program use: Program was very easy to use, but also used a lot of ram on our poor old compy.

Cost: $29.99 CAD for 20 page book. Shipping was $8.39 CAD to Alberta and GST was $1.50 CAD
Total: $39.88 CAD

Quality of Printing: Pretty good. Paper was similar to what you’d find in a story book.

Shipping Time: I ordered it on November 1st. It was shipped on November 4th and arrived on the 12th. Not bad.

Mr. Bean and I have decide that for our future printing projects, we’re going to go with Photo impress, for you get more “bang for you buck” and shipping is A LOT cheaper and faster since we’re in Canada.

What have been your experiences with Online Photobook printing places? Which ones would you use again?