Hi Kevin,
Reading the new L type article, you gush quite a lot and it seems to be written as an advertorial.
I think it's important to disclose to your paying subscribers such as myself whether the article was paid for by L type or whether you personally or the company received free product in exchange for the article.
It's not necessarily a bad thing - You can review things for us if you receive them for free, but I think clear disclosure should be part of the sites ethics and policies.
Cheers,
Dan
I have been associated with this website for a very long time, and to the best of my knowledge, which Kevin can confirm or amend, the site neither receives money from companies whose products are reviewed, nor pays contributors for articles. It is a two-way voluntary street.
I read the article and I watched the video. There is nothing exaggerated in any of that material. The quality and presentation of the L-Type product is very much how Kevin described it. Kevin is definitely better at conveying enthusiasm with gusto than I am, but that's just a difference of style - our perception of the underlying fundamentals is the same. The L-Type prints are superb.
There are, however, only two statements in Kevin's piece that I need to comment on.
Kevin seems to be saying that with inkjet you are more likely to be seeing pixels or dots than with L-type. Well, not quite - it depends on how you make the inkjet print. I would need a good magnifier to see dot structure in the prints that emerge from my Epson SC-P5000. With bare, normal human vision one sees none of that either in L-Type or in my inkjet prints. Yes, if people make their inkjet prints too large relative to the available pixels, the quality degrades and as you get down to 180PPI and below, you can begin to see structure. Bur print correctly with a decent printer and you won't.
Next, Kevin makes a distinction between my technical review of the process and product and his "practical" review, as if to imply that somehow technical research into the quality of their product is not "practical". This is a false dichotomy. The high quality of the prints that Kevin extols is only possible because of the technical factors that I explored in some depth in my article. It's fine for any one with an experienced eye to tell you the quality is great, and looking at a print over the internet, you just have a choice of believing it or not believing it - like for paper reviews; however, when one has objective data to underpin the reality of the product, and the data coheres with the perception of the results, you have a much more robust story line. I would also remind, just to second Kevin's appreciation of the product, that I too sent files to Lumejet for printing and I was equally impressed with the quality of what I got back. I also covered this in my review, and as I mentioned there, it is factually difficult to distinguish quality differences between L-Type and well-made inkjet prints. So I'm with Kevin on this, but would only caution that it doesn't make sense to dichotomize between the technical and the visual in the context of a print review. Needless to say, as a consumer of the product you don't need any technical analysis to appreciate the prints - just look at them, and in the end that is what matters most to most of the people - other than to *some* reviewers, at least one of whom should have one eye on the technical and the other on the "practical", hoping that they connect somewhere in the mental ether! :-)
Cheers Kevin - good presentation, and well deserved for this product.