Hardcover photo book question

Has anyone used Mpix or anyone else to produce a bound hardcover custom book of your photo images? I am thinking of giving a few of these out for Christmas but don't know who to use. I recently read a review of somone who used MPix to produce a bound book and they said the image quality was poor and washed out and the binding of the book itself was also poor.
Needless to say, I don't want the quality of my images to get any worse during the printing process, nor do I want the book to fall apart after opening it for a few times.
Anybody had any better luck with anyone?

Thanks

Don Gorczynski
www.naturewildphotography.com

A friend of mine just showed me a book he had done through Kodak and it was stunning. The paper quality and image quality was gorgeous. The only complaint he had was that the templates didn't allow for much text, and he would have like to have written more.
I'm designing a book through blurb.com, but haven't completed it yet, so I don't know what the quality will be. Prices are great, there are loads of templates for page layouts and many of the templates allow for a good amount of text.

Linda
upstate NY

Have a look at MY PUBLISHER, they do a good job with lots of layout options. For a real high end job (and expensive) look at PITKO. I have used MY PUBLISHER to create mock book layouts for book proposals and they do a good job, not the quality of PITKO, but still good.

I used picaboo, which was VERY easy to use but the colors were NOT vibrant, the pages were thin and the high res photos that I used looked noisy. It would be ok for a gift for Mom, but it was not up to the "photo" quality that I wanted for our freelance photography business. I am interested to see what people think of blurb, and I am trying out digi-photo right now. I have also heard good things about lulu.

I used Shutterfly. Very good results.

I've used Shutterfly with good results too.

Lulu quality is okay, but it doesn't replace a portfolio for showing your work. It isn't professional grade. I use it because it's fun and relatively cheap, and because I get to do the layout exactly as I please, unlike blurb. You simply create a PDF from your original document (I use MS Word) and upload it to Lulu.