Press Printing Woes

[cman78]

I will first say I am a rookie when it comes to printing processes and I know there are loads of things I need to learn. Here is my first lesson the hard way. Let the lashing begin.

So we ordered some 7x5 press printed books from WHCC and had to learned that soft focused pictures don't look good on press printed pages. At least that's what the gal at WHCC told me. I don't think that the quality is WHCC's fault, the pages that have sharp images on them look really good and the dots are almost unnoticable.

The pages are spreads so there are smaller photos on each 7x5 page. Which makes them pretty small. You can see the dots in a number of photos and on some the quality is just down right horrible. To be honest they look like they were printed on a 10 year old $40 inkjet.

My ignorance shows in that I did not know that in "press printing" the dots are very apparent. I would guess that I should have taken the printing process into consideration more when processing the photos. We printed these photos in both press print and photo print.

My next question then is if I don't want press printed books and I want a photo book that my intentional soft focus will look good, where do I go? Or what kind of printing process should I be looking for? I am not made of money and would like to learn the rest of this lesson the soft way. I have heard good things about AsukaBooks for high quality stuff, course I heard good things about WHCC too but they don't fit my book printing needs.

Any comments or advice would be appreciated.