Are Cheap Album Manufacturers Days Numbered?

Regarding the accusation that Scott album products are declining in quality:

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am returning to the hobby after a 40-year hiatus. I have an old Scott National album that I cherished as a young man. I was disturbed by several comments I read that Scott quality was not what it used to be. To determine if I wanted to continue with Scott, or maybe move to a different product, I needed to test the quality. To that end, I ordered a 2016 supplement to compare the new product with my pre-1980 National album. I received the supplement today.

- The new pages are a nice cream-verging-on-manilla color. Definitely off-white.(Forgive my inability to gauge the color, my ex used to complain that I didn't know the difference between teal and sea-foam. Must be a malfunction of the male of the species.) The color is lighter than the original pages, but that some of that is definitely due to age. I can see the darkening of the originals, particularly around the edges.

- There is a detectable difference in the texture of the paper. The new pages feel a bit smoother. I don't know if that's good or bad.

- The print quality looks just fine.

- The new pages are HEAVIER. I weighed the 18 pages of the supplement and 18 pages of my original (which had a couple of stamps to give it a head start). The original: 130 grams. The new pages: 165 grams. That's 27 percent heavier. That is not insignificant.

So...I have read in these pages that Scott album products have been declining in quality. Upon what these reviewers basing their accusation?

Yes, I think that ALL stamp albums are overpriced compared with 40 years ago. (I paid about $20 for my album in the mid-to-late 70s). So, a legitimate argument could be made that bang-for-the-buck has diminished...but why single out Scott?

All in all, the Scott National album appears to be a great product. The notion that its quality has declined baffles me. I would love someone out there who feels this way to explain their position with some supporting detail.

I have decided that I will continue with the Scott National for the time being. In my humble opinion the Scott National is a classic-looking, high-quality product.

Gene

P.S...this is NOT a paid advertisement

Another factor is that many collectors have moved from printed albums to using stockbooks and stock sheets. These give the collector more "freedom" in terms of what to collect and allow inclusion of varieties that may not be included in a printed album. And at least in the USA the cost is comporable (and no need to buy mounts or hinges which is a BIG savings). I went to the stock page route (i use ligh thouse 2-sided Vario pages) and I don't think I could ever return to paper albums again.

I can't compare Scott albums, but my broad sense is that, whilst paper is now of a higher quality, binders are not. Many older, handmade, cloth-bound binders put today's efforts to shame. I'd add that the real comparison with stock-books or stock-leaves is a plain album page, not a printed one. Plain leaves still offer the most flexibility - stock material just does not meet the range of stamp sizes that one finds in consecutive issues.

Saying it's true doesn't make it true. Scott's albums and pages are not declining in quality. As a user of Scott albums (I bought my first Scott National album in about 1962), I can assure anyone that the quality of the paper and the binders is just as good -- perhaps better -- than they ever were. So, I don't know why this claim is being made. It just is not true.

What has happened is that the market for stamp products has shrunk as collectors have aged and fewer new collectors have gotten into the hobby. Consequently, all the album makers out there have had to either raise prices or produce cheaper products.

The cost of albums has given rise to a number of new albums like the inexpensive Mystic albums as well as to a new way of printing your own pages (Steiner's pages). Both are perfectly reasonable ways toward having an album, but both have drawbacks.

The Mystic albums are nicely designed, but they are printed on flimsy paper. Fill a Mystic page with stamps mounted in stamp mounts and it will eventually sag. And they go into cheap three-ring binders that have no elegance to them. Even the "fancy" ribbed three-ring Mystic binders just look to me like fancy school binders. It's the rings, I guess. I don't even like the new three-ring format Scott uses, preferring either the old two-post format or one of the European multi-ring formats which don't look nearly as clunky. Maybe it's the enormous size of the Scott album rings that seems so absurd. Why didn't Scott (which never seems creative enough to come up with anything very clever) adopt a multi-ring approach like Lighthouse and Schaubek use? They have invented the metal-hinged binder which helps solve the problem of binder hinges collapsing over time. That's a good idea for sure.

Steiner's print-yourself pages are a really clever idea, but I find the resulting pages much too small and much too cluttered. Album pages used to look elegant, stamps were spread out, borders were fancy, page sizes were large. You had the impression when you looked through one of the older albums that you were looking at something really beautiful and rare. Looking through a three-ring binder of Steiner pages is less impressive, to say the least. I have nothing against albums filled with Steiner pages -- in fact I have a couple Steiner albums, myself -- but they're not nearly as attractive as older albums. Maybe it's the three-ring binder which reminds me of school binders. Or maybe it's the overly-crowded pages. Maybe if I printed Steiner pages on larger blank pages and mounted them in a more elegant binder, it would change my feeling. But I'd need to buy a fairly-expensive large-format printer.

There is a service that will print Steiner's page layouts on larger Scott-sized pages but you end up paying close to the price you'd pay if you just bought the Scott pages in the first place. Which is what I usually do. And they are very good pages on heavyweight paper, nicely laid out (usually) and held in good quality (two post!) binders.

I don't feel I'm paying too much, either. I can have an entire country's album consisting of hundreds of pages in multiple Scott binders for a few hundred dollars. Davo, Schaubeck, and Lighthouse albums for the same countries cost two, three, even four times as much as Scott. And you can buy your pages one section of the album at a time, adding a few decades worth of pages whenever you can afford them.

Steiner pages appear more cluttered because he is trying to reduce the total number of pages. As always a trade off.

One compromise could be to go to legal size paper 8.5 x 14 and I see there are some 4 ring binders for these.

DrewM

Are you comparing the hingeless albums to Scott albums as that is unfair.

Many of the standard (no mounts) albums produced are in the same ball park as Scott. I have some Davo standard which I put in the better binders and they are cheaper than Scott. I also have some Schaubek standard albums and their price is also comparable. Even Palo standard is comparable.

If you take any standard album and add all your own mounts, you will be about the same price as hingeless with a great deal more work.

I use hingeless albums for most mint stamp collections and standard using hinges for used.

I think Steiner's pages are usually less cluttered than Scott's and I often find myself wishing he'd have put more stamps on certain pages. A dozen or so regular sized commems on a page, or 20-30 small definitives isn't overdoing it, in my opinion. They are small-ish, though, but if he formatted them for 10x12, for example, most people wouldn't be able to print them.

Davo "standard" albums use cheaper, thinner pages. They're very nice, but their other albums (with padded covers) use heavyweight pages using the same page layouts. These Davo standard albums, always without mounts, are good entry albums for collectors, much less expensive than the other Davo albums which parallel them. I have a few Davo standard albums and many Davo albums with the heavier pages. The standard comes in a canvas-covered binder with two pins or screws through the binder. A little awkward, I think. The other albums come in padded binders (much nicer) with two posts inside the covers, not through the covers like the standard uses. Both are very nice, though.

The heavier weight Davo pages come both with mounts and without, although Davo does not always make this clear, preferring to sell the more expensive pages with mounts on them.

Buying pages with mounts is much more expensive initially, but as Dutchman says, in the long run you do save money since you don't have to buy mounts separately, and you save work since you don't have to add one mount at a time which can get laborious. These mounts are clear mounts, though, so anyone who likes the black-backed mounts will have to buy Davo albums without mounts, either thin or thick pages.

Dutchman, I'm not sure what you are asking when you say, "DrewM, Are you comparing the hingeless albums to Scott albums as that is unfair." I don't think I'm comparing them, but what are you referring to? Can you explain?

As for the Steiner pages, they print onto 8.5 x 11 standard computer paper, as we all know, and I don't imagine they'll ever be configured for legal size paper as collectors don't use that size for albums. At least I've never seen that size used. Printing Steiner's page layouts onto larger album pages so they look more like "real" album pages of the classic type is a very good idea. It can be done, but it requires a "wide bed" printer to fit that size paper. "That" size paper would be maybe 10 x 12 or so.

A wide bed printer will cost typically between $2-300 nowadays, but I could be wrong as prices change quickly. They used to sell for much more ($500) and may be dropping in price. I may get one myself and try printing some Steiner albums onto larger sized pages to go into something like Scott, Davo, or Schaubeck binders. I don't find the 8.5 x 11 computer paper size very attractive for stamp albums, but many collectors like that size just fine and it certainly makes life a lot easier to just print on a standard printer you already own.

Mystic does publish a U.S. album with mounts already attached (It's not cheap). I'm not sure if the paper in that album is heavier than in the equivalent album without mounts. But I'd still much prefer Scott National album pages. They just look better to me.

Scott sells a hingeless U.S. album which is actually a Schaubeck album that adds mounts to pages laid out exactly like the pages in the Scott National album (which has no mounts). It replaces Scott's earlier hingeless album which is no longer sold. But it's super expensive, well over a thousand dollars for an entire set. I imagine they don't sell very many of them.