ahhhh so hard!!! honestly i love xscapes' photos. currently one of my favorite kai fansites, i think. xscape has released some pretty great photos recently, and they're all so gloriously hq *A*. but it's hard to say whether xscape's goods would turn out nice since this is their first photobook, there is nothing previous to judge on...!
some people say trust your first instinct -- and my first instinct, when i saw each fansite's teasers, is that oaokai's teasers were way more interesting and appealing. i'm on a hard fast no-buy for photobooks for the rest of the year but once i saw oaokai's teasers i was like !!! SO TEMPTED !!! imo oaokai's goods and designs are pretty unique and fun -- their first photobook was so fun to look through, i thought. what i loved about it is that she put so many details, comments, and focal points in the photobook that you could tell the fansite master was a really enthusiastic kai stan. she loved the things about jongin that we love about jongin, and she wasn't shy about pointing all of those things out in the photobook. this was facilitated by the fact that the layout of most pages were very creative; not just photos slapped on the page, but carefully arranged and cropped to tell a story (and probably took the fansite master more time to plan everything out -- a good thing!). if you look at oaokai's "page preview" for the second photobook, it's going to be the same effort of design:
http://www.kaiwonderland.com/#!pagepreview/cwfi
the drawback of oaokai's goods is that it's a bit of a gamble... are all of the designs A+++? maybe not. oaokai's photos aren't /always/ hq; in this point, xscape seems more consistent. also, quality of materials is sometimes hit or miss? oaokai's first photobook was called a "photo magazine" and it had, as the name suggested, thin magazine paper. quite a few people were disappointed by this, i think. this time oaokai is calling golden venus an "art book." i have no idea what this means lolololol (though on the notice oaokai said "paper is similar to die jungs but thicker" so that suggests quality is like an actual art book) but ig my point is that oaokai puts out products that can be unexpected.
i think if you're looking for a "standard" but (probably) high quality photobook, i'd go with xscape. idt you can go wrong with xscape (their notice/mini site looks great, their photos are great, i expect the output to be great as well) but if you put the xscape photobook in a lineup of photobooks, would it jump out at you? again, hard to say, since i haven't seen any previous xscape goods to compare, but i have a hunch the answer is probably not. however, if you're only going to buy one/very few kai photobooks, perhaps getting something "normal" is a good thing (and it's $5 cheaper than oaokai!). but if you're looking for something more fun and don't mind a little risk or that it might not be the same format as a usual photobook (A4 size, 200 page, etc etc), go for oaokai!
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