Feldgrau Author: Marc Rikmenspoel

Discussion, background, reviews, and critical analysis of works by Feldgrau.net members who are published authors.
John P. Moore
Author & Moderator
Posts: 1868
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 10:40 pm
Location: Portland, Oregon & France

Re: Feldgrau Author: Marc Rikmenspoel

Post by John P. Moore »

I just noticed on Amazon in the US that the selling price for new copies of Sunwheels and Siegrunen has dropped from $99.99 to only $30.31. Might be an error on Amazon's part, but that is a bargain price for a good book.

http://www.amazon.com/Sunwheels-Siegrun ... ikmenspoel
John P. Moore
Author & Moderator
Posts: 1868
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 10:40 pm
Location: Portland, Oregon & France

Re: Feldgrau Author: Marc Rikmenspoel

Post by John P. Moore »

"Amazon honored their discounted price of USD 30.31 when I placed my order. My copy arrived today. The text and photo captions are very good. Most of the photos were new to me and it was interesting to place a face with a name. Unfortunately, about half of the photos appear quite a bit darker than one would expect, while other photos suffer a loss of resolution or a combination. Not believing what I was seeing, I compared photos in the “Sunwheel….. “ book to the same photos in other books and I found a noticeable difference in quality. The photos with the darkness issues are obvious. Here are a few examples relating to resolution. The photo of Mühlenkamp on the top pf page 272 in Sunwheels compared to the same photo in the middle of page 164 in the Paul Oosterling, Ron Erling and Hans Fischer’s book, “Standartenführer Johannes Mühlenkamp und seine Männer”. The photos in the Oosterling book do not have any of the darkness issues seen in the Sunwheel book. On the bottom of page 286 in Sunwheels there is a photo of Eberhard Heder. The same photo of Heder appears on page 286 of Vol. 7 of Mark Yerger’s DKiG series. That photo in Sunwheels is darker and with lower resolution. As Helion published both Sunwheels and Vol 1 of Mark Yerger’s Totenkopf book in 2015 by the same company in Malta one would expect that photo quality would be similar, however, that is not the case. The photos in Totenkopf are lighter with apparent higher resolution and are more pleasing to the eye, at least for me. The only processing difference between the two is that the design and typesetting were done by different firms in the UK. Hopefully, Helion can do better in Volume 2. I believe that most readers would be willing to pay extra if this publisher would expend the same effort to achieve outstanding photos such as we typically see in RZM books.
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