Allen's Antique Chinese Porcelain ***The Detection of Fakes***: Second Edition

Swift delivery and a great book !!

I’ve just received this and I’m not one for leaving reviews, but maan….and I’m sorry to say this; the quality of the images is disappointingly poor. Many are dark, blurry and no contrast. For this subject, in which detail is so important, they should be better.Granted, these are (I think) mostly ‘user’ images submitted for the project or grabbed from online, so the photography level was amateur to start with. But why weren’t they improved in Photoshop before publishing? I’m sure there are many who would have provided that service for free in return for a copy of the book – I would have!I think the print and paper quality is also partly to blame – the paper is matt and not the same print quality you’d expect from a reference book, just a few rungs up from a home printing project (the book was printed by Amazon).So while the knowledge contained in this book is priceless, the quality has been neglected at the expense of the buyer. £80 for most of us is a big chunk of money to invest in a book… it’s is not a casual purchase. If it was £20 I wouldn’t be this disappointed but for £80 it should be close to perfect.I’ll come back and edit this review more positively if, after reading cover-to-cover it becomes apparent that clarity in the images isn’t so important.