Design Context - Mockup book from LULU

A few days ago, I mocked up a the format of my design context publication to be sent to print. I wanted to test out the print quality of Lulu.com as it's a potential place to use to get my final publication(s) printed. that was ordered on monday morning and I received the printed publication 4 days later.

Here is my review of the print quality, finish and conclusion on whether this is still an option for getting the book printed based on the print quality of this mockup.

Front/back covers - finish 
The cover was printed on a coated white stock, which feels quite nice, some might say it feel's like a text book but I'm ok with it as I'm planning on using a wrap around for the front/back covers anyway. The type on the edge has been slightly misaligned; it seems to be much further out of the page than I had developed. The colour strip at the back is pretty much how I had expected really; not amazing but not bad either so I'm happy with that. On the positive note, the spine is really nice, no errors that I can see and bind is to a good standard.

Print details - line weights
If I'm going to compromise on printing colour, the print quality of black & white needs to be pretty good, as shown from the line weight chart, the print quality of lulu is more than adequate for printing fine rules. The black of the weights are a good solid black, not shiny!

Opacity
The quality of different tints of black however didn't come out as well compared to the solid black; similar to a laser lack & white printer, the toner marks are evident from this test.

Black & white images printed in the black & whit setting were slightly better in terms of tones of black it reproduced, so if I was to go with this option, I will have to manually adjust all the images to black & white.

Opacity levels for black & white images, might not require this for my context book but still useful to see what the quality is like for different opacity levels for the images.

I also tested out some potential typefaces that I'm thinking of using for the publication, this tests run across several spreads of the publications going from 5pt to 15pt.

The majority of the rest of the book just contains a range of the different typefaces I tested out in the full alphabet but in 100pt/100pt, testing the print quality and how much of the inside margin affects the design.

Conclusion
Generally quite impressed with the finish and quality of the book itself considering the price of it. The online submission form and requirements are pretty straight forward to follow. Delivery time and service is pretty good, having received the book itself 4 days after project submission and purchase, so definitely a viable place to get any last minute publications printed from. There are a few issues in terms of minor adjustments with margins and bleeds, particularly with the front cover, but I guess this won't be a massive concern for me if I'm planning of printing the cover somewhere else and using a wrap around it anyway. I'm quite satisfied with the print quality, especially for what I'm after so I'm pretty sure I'll be getting it printed with them now.