Albums Unlimited - Flush Mount Album

[Scott_Quier]

About a month ago, I ordered a studio demo of what Albums Unlimited calls their Kingston Flush Mount album (see their propoganda page here). I arrived today, just in time for a couple of inteviews with prospective brides.

I've got to say that I am very impressed with the "fit and finish" of this album. I didn't order it all decked out. Just 12 sides in 10 x 10 format, their "M-Series" cover (leatherette) and 3 lines of custom embossing (2 on the cover, client names and date) and the studio name on the inside front cover.

The book arrived in a very large box, well padded with shipping peanuts. Inside the shipping box was their "standard gift box". That's shiny black with an Albums Unlimited sticker on the lower right corner.

Inside the black box is the ablum. But, wait! There's more. The album is packaged inside a sheet of very thin "bubble pad", but it's the sort with very tiny bubbles. Inside that is a sheet of tissue paper. Finally, we get to the book itself.

This thing is surprisingly massive. The hard covers are approximately 6mm thick (I'm a chemist by training, I think in metric). Adheared to the inside of each cover (front and back) is a fabric covered hard board, the size of the page. This board is another 2.5 - 3mm thick.

Inside the front cover is a thick sheet of velum (sp?)

Each page of the book is approx 2mm thick. On each side is the print.

I supplied them with very high resolution jpg files in square aspect ratio and let them worry about resizing the image to fit the page. They printed it on their paper (you have a selection, I went with their recommended lustre finish), cut it to fit the page and etc. The prints are trimmed very nicely and are flush with the edge of the mounting (I guess that's where the "flush" in the name comes from?).

The page gutter is nearly non-existant. Between just two facing sides, I can measure something quite a bit less than 0.5mm. On all the rest of the gutters, I can't measure the gap. Pretty cool!

Bottom line - I'm really looking forward to presenting this demo album to my clients. I don't think I'm going to have to hard sell this thing at all. It is simply georgeous!

As I work a 9 - 5 and had a bunch of stuff to do in preparation for tomorrow, I have not yet had the chance to take any photos of the album for this posting. I will correct that sometime tomorrow afternoon if my timing works out right. I just had to share my first impressions of this thing - in the spirit of giving back as I've received so much benefit from this forum over the last several months!