8. Lulu

Last up is Lulu, which offers a stand-alone online service for book creation. In this way, Lulu is more like Picaboo and Blurb than Shutterfly, Kodak and Snapfish.

Like all the other services tested, Lulu offers a variety of background and theme choices — what sets Lulu apart in this category are specific university themes. Among the university themes that Lulu offers are ones for University of Alabama, Boise State University, Clemson University, University of Kentucky, Louisiana State University, University of Miami, Oklahoma State University and Virginia Tech.

Unlike every other service tested, Lulu’s smallest size is a 7x9. For a 20-page soft cover book at that size, Lulu currently charges $14.95. Each additional page costs 50 cents.

We faced a number of problems when we used Lulu’s online photo book building tool (called Lulu Studio). First of all, over the course of our testing period we faced intermittent delays trying to get images loaded into the Lulu system. No other system tested had any noticeable delays or issues with image uploads.

Individual page layout selection is similar to other services but it is lacking any sort of layout filter based on the number images you want to include.

There is also no "undo" button to revert back to a past layout or image. You can’t do much with your images as there are no online photo editing capabilities in Lulu Studio. There is no obvious way of changing orientation of images, either.

The order confirmation to order-ship confirmation communication from Lulu was also a problem. In fact, Lulu had the worst results here by a wide margin. The time between order confirmation and shipment confirmation came in at a whopping 169 hours — the book didn’t ship until a full week after we had ordered it.

To add insult to injury, Lulu teases users with a "super-mega-fast" shipping option, which adds another $50 to the cost of production. The problem is that even though the Lulu system offered us the option of "super mega fast," it wouldn’t actually let us purchase that option. When we contacted the company, the support staff claimed that the "super mega fast" option that we saw was a glitch and is not actually available to photo book customers.

Though Lulu had some problems during the book creation process, the final product was a superb soft-cover book. The color image on the front cover adds to the overall positive impression that Lulu’s final product offers, though it’s not as impressive as the full-photo cover that is on the Blurb book. The cover stock itself is a glossy bookstore-quality cardstock that is similar to what Blurb offers.

In the interior of the book, the framed image approach makes the images look more impressive than they would look were they just floating on a white background. Image quality wasn’t quite as bright here as we would have liked, though contrast and sharpness were very good and images were not washed out.