© 2008 skratchworx.com
skratchworx may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission.
Introduction
Stamping your mark on your DJ setup is often hard, unless you want to break out the screwdriver and attack your expensive hardware with a spray can. But you can add a certain bit of your own personality with customised slipmats.
Without doing too much research into alternatives, the undisputed king of the custom mat has been Slikmats. I've reviewed them, own a few custom pairs and love them. But the £20 price tag compared to regular mats has, for many people been a bit too steep. Strange considering it's the price of a couple of vinyls and the mats will see much more action. But now there's an alternative in the shape of customslipmats.co.uk - near identical mats to Slikmats but for half the price.
I refuse to write the same stuff that I've written ad infinitum about slipmats - look at the other reviews to get the lowdown on the types and how they work. All you need to know is that these are the thicker felt style mats - soft, squidgy and forgiving under hand.
They appear to be a near identical material to Slikmats as well - white, fibrous and without breaking out my CSI kit, I'd say Polyester (actually it tells me that on their site). Essentially the creation of the mats is the same - design something that fits within a 300DPI 297mm diameter circle and squirt it up the intertubes to customslipmats.co.uk. A few days later back comes your pair of mats and you can sit and stare at the brilliance of your handiwork. The only difference I have noted is that the Slikmats border is smaller. One day maybe an edge to edge mat can be produced.
The image is produced (I believe) via inkjet but I can't detect any dots at all. This is truly continuous tone and offers a sharp saturated image. Colours are certainly brighter than a conventional CMYK image so you should be able to achieve so pretty dayglo images.
In Use
Look - it's a slipmat. It works as it's supposed to or else they wouldn't sell them right? They feel just like a Slikmat and that's what we want. After 2 weeks of daily playing, there is some evidence of wear but that's the same as any mat. I really don't know what say beyond that.
Summing Up
Buyers of this mat want one thing - to stamp their identity on their DJ setup and these customslipmats.co.uk mats do just that for very little cash. And it also helps that the mats slip properly too instead of sticking to either that platter or vinyl.
Ratings
Build Quality - 9/10
Superb quality image but they might not last long as you want.
Value For Money - 10/10
When you consider that these mats are half the price of the nearest competitor but offer the same quality, it's hard to knock any marks off.
The Bottom Line
Need a stack of promotional mats or just some narcissistic need to see you name on your decks? Buy customslipmats.co.uk mats - they rock.