qoop = dissapointing but…

Logo_qoop_main

On my June 16 blog entry I expressed my excitement about having ordered my first flickr-photo-book with Qoop. Well, what can I say, I am dissapointed to no end. The image quality is absolutely poor. They’re dark and simply printed with a color laser printer. I *veryverymuchdislike* color laser printer photo prints. I regret having spent a whopping $75 on our ‘wedding book’.

If you care about excellent photo print quality, do NOT order from QOOP.
But, is there alternative out there?

……

UPDATE: Make sure to read the comments to this entry. A QOOP employee left a comment. I guess, this is part of today’s customer support; making sure, that blog entries out there are positive about one’s product/company. I am impressed!

UPDATE NUMBER 2: I am absolutely blown away by QOOP’s customer service. Just having expressed my frustration with the end result of the QOOP book on here, had the CEO Bill, who I referred to as ‘an employee of QOOP” and now the President email me. I just got this a minute ago:

Hi Tina,

I’ll have your money refunded. I’m sorry you weren’t satisfied with the print. The new internal paper should help with that. We’ll have that up by the end of this week.

By the way, Bill is the CEO of QOOP, but we both spend a fair bit of time minding customer service for good feedback like yours.

Regards,

Phil Wessells
President
QOOP, Inc.

Kudos guys! I am very impressed and there’s many companies out there who should learn from you. I appreciate the refund. Thank you.

I will try your services again, sometime down the road.

20 Comments leave a comment below

  1. have you tried Shutterfly? I saw a book a friend had done and it was quite good.

  2. I keep ordering the snapbooks on shutterfly, I never ordered the books though. Thanks for the tip.

  3. Have you looked closely at the logo? It’s a frown… :(

  4. Ha, that’s too funny BB! I should have known, right?

  5. Tina –

    We are very sorry to hear that you were disappointed with your book and we wish that you had emailed us. Perhaps you could send us an email at [email protected] with more information on what you are seeing? Are all the photos dark? How about the outdoor shots I see in the stream? Some photos are dark in the original stream from Flickr as I am sure you know – but I assume there seems to be a shift throughout?

    And we will gladly refund your money.

    As for the printing – we print these books on an extremely high-end commercial digital press. I just don’t want other readers thinking that we print on an HP laser printer. FYI you can’t actually make a perfect bound book from photo paper like Kodak or Fuji sells – you can only make wire-O because it will not adhere to the glue.

    We are not sure what happened with your book. We also print for wedding photographers, artists and architectural firms and they have been very happy customers. Perhaps the printer had some issues that day which were not caught by quality control. We can reprint your book or refund your money – your choice.

    Thank you for the comments and we apologize again for the poor experience.

    – Bill
    QOOP

  6. Oooooh, T! The girl’s got game! Make sure you let everyone know what happens with this one. :)

  7. I had a similar disappointment with QOOP, though I wasn’t as disappointed since my book was smaller and was more along the lines of a book of contact prints and cost less ($20). The photographs were dithered, pixely — they generally looked very ugly. I’m very surprised to hear that wedding photographers and architects use the service. I love the *idea* of the service since I’ve got lots of photographs in flickr, but it doesn’t deliver the goods.

  8. Rakesh –

    We are sorry that you felt similarly (you are all different people right?)

    We should have a new paper stock going live next week which we believe you will like – 100 # (100 lb) gloss. Took a while it make that stock work with the perfect binding glue. After it goes live order another book of reasonable length and send your order number to [email protected] and we will send you a free one – you can be a paper beta site if you are willing. The only part of the deal is you have to email us at [email protected] with your thoughts BEFORE you post!

    And Tina thank you for the cool note we appreciate that.

    – Bill

  9. YAY! I can’t wait to see the books on the new paper stock! 100lb gloss – WOW!

  10. that’s too bad. I saw keith’s (overshadowed.com) book and it looked pretty good to me. I was actually surprised with the print quality that I saw. I was expecting something much cheaper, based on the principle and price.

    it looked ok, except for the annoying Qoop logo at the back which made it look pretty lame and generic. it would’ve looked more valuable and special without logo. oh well. I guess you can’t have it all.

  11. We will be implementing the ability to print without the logos on the back of the book soon.

    Aren’t you going to miss Dos Pesos? :)

    Tin

  12. Good call, Tin.

    How about a spine printing option for books that are big enough to fit it?

    Also, down the line it would be nice to have another format which was wider than tall to better fit horizontals. 9″ x 6″ or something.

  13. I agree with Eliot’s comment about a horizontal format!

  14. We have new formats on the drawing board – wider than tall. And logo option is coming soon – took of posters yesterday.

    – Bill

  15. Wow – even if the quality of qoop doesn’t seem to be the best, the reaction is great.

  16. I did a book for our wedding too, although a bit late to read swissmiss comments, I felt exactly how she feel when I received the book flying all the way from US to Netherlands. the print is in compressed low resolution and dark. The size of the photos is also small in a 4 to a page layout. At the end my text remark below the photos is far too big. Lack of customization I guess is another weakness of qoop.

    hopefully by now, it’s improved, I like the cover though. The Netherlands has very good digital book print too, but to have the print link directly from flickr is fantastic, I really hope qoop get better too before I come back for another service.

  17. This is June 2007, and Qoop’s print quality is still terrible. The paper they use is actually very good (Fuji Crystal Archive), but the ink looks very cheap to me (e.g., quality of faces is terrible, the photo looks “digitized”, i.e. one can see the pixels).

    I am a photographer with knowledge of resolutions etc (didn’t have time to print this batch of photos myself this time), and I did upload high resolution images.

    Very disappointed…looking for alternatives.

  18. i recently placed an order and while i am pleased with the outcome of the picture 2 things were wrong. the first was my photo arrived glossy and i picked matte. the second was the way it was shipped. this may not be a direct result of qoop but it arrived and the cap was off the tube and placed inside. a piece of crumpled up paper was jammed inside, for what reason is beyond me. then a piece of tape was put across to keep everything inside. more than likely a product of DHL but either way my picture was ruined. a couple of scratches and creases all over the place. hopefully the sitaution can be rectified

  19. I love the idea of the QOOP photo book, but from reading this it is disappointing to hear that the quality is not that great.
    Have you used Mixbook? Anyone?