Mentioned it already a few times before in some other postings around here. Well finally it is here my book from a wonderful surf trip around Iceland. The final trigger for ordering it was because I could get a discount off 30 euro's from Saal Digital if I ordered my book there and write something about it here on Steemit. So now that is out of our way I'll start my review. Just to be sure that you know I didn't get the book for free only a discount and in return I would write something about the book.

Order process

As mentioned before I was already working at this book and I only had to finish some pages before ordering it. Last year I ordered my book for my trip in Scotland with Saal as well. I create my book designs in Indesign and export them as multiple high resolution JPEG files. So I can't really tell you guys how user friendly the software is from Saal, as I only placed my full spreads in it and ordered the book.

That process was quite easy to do. Filled in my discount code and payed trough Paypal. Two days after I ordered the book I got an e-mail that the book was send by DHL and two days after that the postman was at the door. The book was delivered quicker than I thought, because Saal prints in Germany and it needs to be send to the Netherlands.

Opening the box

This is how I received the package. Brown box envelop with a foil around the book. Pretty decent for delivering books I think. Blurb delivers them packaged the same way.

After opening the book, I noticed the spreads and the reason I would love to order with Saal. My books ordered by blurb before didn't have the flat spread. (Blurb offers this service now also but didn't try that yet).

The book I ordered was in the size of 28 by 29 cm. It has 112 pages printed on matte paper with an unpadded shiny cover wrapped around it.

I could also pay for removing the barcode at the end of the book, but that will cost you 5 euros and the barcode is really small. So don't think many people will use this option.

The cover for the book is thick, although I didn't choose the padded version. The logo created for the trip is good to read although it's white on a black and white image.

The image shows just the feeling I had with the trip. Although I created multiple versions @dboontje chooses the same cover for his book.

Now we're getting with the best part of these books. The pages are just thick, so you wouldn't have to be afraid that there will be pages folding while reading the book. The pages are that thick because of the lay flat binding technology they're using for printing the books.

Image quality

The print quality for the pages is good. Not perfect I have a few pictures with a weird thing. But I think that is because I cropped the images and/or sharpened them too much for printing. You can see the distortion in the following image

There is some checked pattern visible, but the weird thing is I only see if with a few black and white images. Not all the images have this pattern while you would expect this everywhere. I expect this because I used the same sharpening amount for all my pictures and even some colored one I used a bigger crop, but the pattern isn't visible in those. But I'll ask this at Saal just to be sure what this effect is and how I could get rid of it. All the other images and text boxes are sharp, the colors are beautiful and the shadows in the pictures are really awesome!

The colors are better then I'm used to in the books I ordered with Blurb.
They offer also ICC profiles so you can soft-proof your images in photoshop/lightroom etc. You can find the ICC profiles here: https://www.saal-digital.com/en-us/service/icc-profile/

Note to myself

One thing I need to remember for my next book, the pages aren't always cut where I would expect that. But that's my own mistake I just had to check that before ordering my book. Think you won't have this when you create your book in the software from Saal.

Conclusion

Will I order my next book with Saal? Yes, I will! My next trip will be to New Zealand and think I'll need to order two books by then. One from the south and one from the north island. Because the lay flat image is perfect so that I can create large spreads and try to take pictures that would fit amazingly on those spreads. But all those spreads consume lots of pages "hehe" and it's still a balance between pages and price.

Outstanding questions

I've got two outstanding questions at Saal. One for a discount code for you guys and another one about the checked pattern. So I'll edit my review later when I got the answers from Saal.