DAVODavo albums are manufactured in the Netherlands. They make albums only for the most popular stamp issuing countries -- plus any place Dutch-related, naturally. This compares with Palo (and Steiner pages) which are produced for every stamp-issuer.
The paper they use is bright white, a bit too white for my taste I've found after having a few Davo albums for some years. My first was purchased in 1970 in Brussels, and it's a Belgium album. I'd much prefer "cream" or "off-white" paper since it's easier on the eyes. I like Scott pages much better in this regard.
Davo produces only their two-post binder which has a padded cover. Earlier Davo albums had the option of a non-padded cloth cover with thinner pages. The surviving albums Davo sells now only have this heavier paper which is more than heavy enough to last a long time.
Pages in Davo albums are large and luxurious, really showcasing the stamps well. Stamp boxes do not encroach on the page borders and the margins are luxuriously wide. I find their page displays somewhat underwhelming, though, because Davo uses only a single line border along with the boxes for stamps. The effect is fairly empty and lacks elegance. Compared to Scott's Specialty page border, Davo pages look a bit bleak for my taste. And the bright white paper only adds to that impression. Your taste may differ, of course, but I like things at least a little "fancy".
All Davo albums come with a slipcase.
Davo also has a service where you can buy (a) elegant colored title pages to replace the black and white title pages their albums come with and (b) replacement pages one at a time in case you damage or lose one. Neither of these options is particularly cheap, but it's helpful at times.
Collecting a single country in a Davo album is very expensive just for the albums (forget the stamps) because you will need multiple volumes. Davo sells each volume of a country at maybe $150-200 a volume, and that's times the number of volumes you need which can be four, five, or six. So album purchases will require a lot of money even before you buy any stamps. If you're not made of money, you might want to give this some serious thought. Multiply that times the number of countries you plan to collect, and it gets very expensive very fast. Some countries will break $1000 just for the complete album, and a few go well above that. It's even more for Lighthouse albums and others like Schaubek, and so on.
SCOTTThis is one reason for the continuing popularity of Scott albums which are much less expensive by half or more. And Scott paper and page layouts are very nice, their binders are good, and the whole process of acquiring them is streamlined and simple through the "AmosAdvantage" website. I now use Scott albums almost exclusively after playing around at one time with a few Lighthouse, Schaubek, Davo, and other albums which I no longer use for the most part. One drawback of Scott albums is that they sell pages only for more popular stamp-issuing countries unlike Palo (and Steiner, of course, who has page layouts for all countries).
PALOThe same price issue applies to Palo Albums which are similarly very expensive. Palo albums also sell for $150-200 per volume, and you will need multiple volumes for each country. If you have any kind of budget, a lot of these albums will be difficult to justify. Both Davo and Palo sell to higher-end collectors, it seems, with Lighthouse and Schaubek selling to people with even more money to spend on their collections. It is possible, though, to have one or two collections in these luxury albums while all the rest of what you collect are housed in more ordinary albums. As someone who collects about 30 different countries (how did that happen?), this is a big concern of mine. If you collect only one or two countries total, you may not be nearly as concerned about album prices as I am.
Palo uses the Bill Steiner page layouts but soups them up a bit to make them nicer. Steiner's page layouts are well known, and they sell
almost for free. You subscribe for a year for about $50 or so or you purchase a CD with all his pages on it. It's about as affordable as you could ever hope for. I've mentioned before that I think Bill Steiner deserves some kind of medal and certainly more attention among leading stamp collectors and stamp organizations for his amazing contribution to stamp collecting that has made it possible for thousands of collectors to have nice-looking stamp albums for any country in the world. I have never seen his contribution to the hobby commented on by any of the major stamp publications or organizations. It's quite bizarre. Maybe his products are just considered too plebeian for them to bother noticing?
Palo's pages are larger by a significant amount so there is more breathing room and they are much more elegant pages. The main drawback of Steiner pages, I find, is that the layouts are cramped to fit onto the size of pages most collectors use, 8.5 x 11" printer paper. I find that size of page too cramped, but many collectors don't seen bothered by it at all -- or maybe it's just that they can't afford larger album pages so are willing to put up with small pages. I prefer to think it's the latter since I think of most stamp collectors as sensitive to appearance and style rather than just cramming stamps onto pages.
Palo uses binders with the somewhat odd 5-ring format. But I understand Palo pages can also fit into regular 3-ring binders, as well, but you'd need to find large binders to accommodate their large size. Davo pages have to go into Davo binders only -- just as Scott Specialty pages generally only fit into Scott Specialty binders. You could re-punch new holes in any of these pages to fit into other binders, of course, but you risk making pages look messy if that doesn't work out so well. I've punched Scott pages to fit some 22-ring binders I have, and they look just fine, but that's not something most collectors are going to do. The original holes aren't very noticeable when you do this. Generally, though you stick to the binders that come with the albums.
Palo's pages are also in a bright white shade.
One thing I really like about Palo albums is that because they rely on Steiner page layouts, they are the only album publisher I know of that makes albums for every stamp-issuing country. (Steiner does not sell albums, of course, but only designs the pages Palo has paid a fee to use.) Scott does not do that, nor does Palo. Both of them only sell albums for the major, popular countries. That means that if you collect a somewhat less popular "oddball" country, Palo may be the only album available -- unless you use blank or quadrille pages, make your own page layouts, and so forth. I have a Malawi collection, so guess what? I had to make my own album. How I did this is described just below. Also a Congo and Zaire collection. And Botswana. And a few others out of the mainstream.
MAKE YOUR OWN PAGES USING STEINER LAYOUTSAnother option is to print your Steiner page layouts on paper larger than 8.5 x 11". Most collectors don't do this, but you can fairly easily. You'll end up with virtually Palo-like album pages at a fairly low cost. Sorry, Palo, but it's not hard to do this.
Option 1 is to buy your pages already printed for you from this website which has Bill Steiner's permission to sell them:
http://www.albumpages.net. They will print on 8.5 x 11" paper or on larger Scott Specialty-size paper (or Minkus-size paper, I think). This is a very good and much cheaper option. The paper they use will have the single-line Steiner page border on it, no matter the size of page you choose. The color of the paper is less eyeball-damaging than the bright white other sellers use. It's an off-white, but not quite the same shade Scott uses. Close enough, I've found, to combine Scott pages with these pages. Cost is about 30c per page, so they're pretty cheap as album pages go. By comparison, fancy pages from other album makers sell for $1, $2, and up per page. Check the website.
Option 2 would be to print your own pages using Steiner's page layouts as your "originals" and photocopy those onto what brand of blank album pages you prefer at some place like Fedex. I wanted Scott-like pages, so I printed on blank Scott paper. It's a page-by-page process, but it goes fairly quickly.
I print borderless Steiner pages onto bordered blank Scott Specialty paper. What comes out is a Steiner page layout on Scott paper that looks completely professional at about 70c a page total. That includes the cost of the blank album paper I buy, the cost of the photocopying, plus a little for using my printer to make the initial "originals".
What do you do about the borders on Steiner pages? You can't very well print Steiner's borders onto bordered blank pages. But you can eliminate them if you save Steiner's pdf page files in Word using a PDF-to-Word conversion program (available for free online). Here's one you can use:
https://lightpdf.com/pdf-to-word Just "Select" each border and delete it ("Enter" or "Backspace") before you print them.
It's also possible to move stamp boxes around, delete any boxes you don't want (I do this for endless souvenir sheets, for example), and so on, though this can get awkward. So, to
some extent, you can modify Steiner's pages before you print them. I print in "Best" quality to keep all the lines smooth and clear.
After you photocopy your pages, the resulting Scott-like pages go into either the 2-post or 3-ring Scott Specialty binder. It looks like a Palo album but it's in a Scott binder. And because Steiner pages are available for every stamp-issuing country in the world, you can make an album pretty cheaply for any country in the world. I've done this for a number of countries Scott does not sell albums for, to add missing pages to my other Scott albums, or to add duplicate pages for mounting additional stamps.
Cheers! Drew M.
Posted 02/14/2022 11:16 pm
