When is it worth buying a DVD printer?
Before you start to think about which CD / DVD printer you should buy, you need to think about if you actually need a CD DVD printer. There are two major factors that you need to consider, these are:
Cost ?- Sometimes it is possible to save a lot of money by moving CD / DVD printing in house. Whether or not this is worthwhile for you or not depends on the volumes of discs you want to print and the uniqueness of each print. The easiest way to explain this is that in terms of volume, very small volumes occurring rarely, should be outsourced to small service bureaus and very large volumes should be sent to be printed using silkscreen printing. It is the middle range volumes that should be produced in house on CD/ DVD printers. If each disc print needs to be unique it is almost always more efficient to print the discs in house as service bureaus tend to charge set up fees for each unique print job.
Convenience - Having an in house CD/ DVD printer is generally far more convenient than outsourcing the work. There are a number of reasons for this; firstly you will almost always want to make changes once you see the print. Although modern day CD/ DVD printers such as the new generation of Microboards products like the PF-3 have excellent color matching, you will never get exactly the colours you see on the screen. This is not due to the quality of the CD/ DVD printer or the monitor; it is simply due to the two devices using different colour technologies. The monitor uses RGB colour (it makes its colours out of red, green and blue) whereas the CD/ DVD printer uses CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) so it is impossible to always match colours on the screen to prints. This is a problem that many companies faced when moving the logos from printed onto the web. The second major convenience factor is that if you have the CD/ DVD printer in house you can produce disc prints quickly, within a minute in many cases, this is great if you need to react to demand quickly or you produce discs on an ad hoc basis.
Who are the big players in the world of CD/ DVD printers?
The CD/ DVD printer industry currently has three major players and a number of smaller players. The three major players are Microboards, Rimage and Primera. Microboards and Rimage co-exist peacefully at different ends of the market with Microboards producing low cost per print ink jet technology based CD/ DVD printers and Rimage manufacturing extremely high quality robust thermal printers. The two operate at such different ends of the market that in the UK and US Microboards actually acts as a distributor for Rimage. Primera is a direct competitor of Microboards, Primera also produce ink jet based low cost CD/ DVD printers. At the present time (December 2007) Microboards appears to have the edge on Primera in terms of cost per print, which at present means that the Microboards models are the more popular choice.
What are the different CD/ DVD printer technologies on offer?
CD/ DVD printing can be divided into three main categories (although other methods do exist). These are Ink Jet, Thermal and Silk Screen. Silk Screen printing is an efficient method of mass producing identical discs and it the sort of method that is generally used by service bureaus. I won't cover this any further as it is not relevant to the purchase of a CD/ DVD printer. Ink Jet technology is the technology which Primera and Microboards compete on, the prints look great and are cheap to produce. The only issue with using an Ink Jet printer is that the prints are prone to damage from water. This is far less of a problem these days though as the media manufacturer Taiyo Yuden now manufacture Water Shield discs that make ink jet prints water resistant. Thermal printing technology is championed mainly by Rimage. It produces a very durable glossy finish disc and consequently Thermal printers generally cost more than Ink Jet printers. This has been a very brief look at the different technologies and there are others available including technologies aimed at people printing just text. To find out more I suggest you visit www.prolok.com and contact one of their experts to talk you through the technologies in greater detail.
Choosing the Correct CD/ DVD Printer
This article has only touched on the various factors involved in choosing a CD/ DVD printer and has not given exact figures. My recommendation would always be to take the information you have learned from this article and speak to an expert. There are a number of very helpful and trustworthy CD/ DVD printer resellers through out the world including the company I work for, Prolok. Most now have very similar pricing so I would suggest you buy from the company that shows a genuine interest in making sure you get the right product for your needs.
Colin Thomas is one of the CD DVD printer experts at http://www.prolok.com/ he has twenty-five years of experience in working with all the major disc printer brands including Rimage, Microboards and Primera.
-
Sign up for PayPal and start accepting credit card payments instantly.
As the world's number one online payment service, PayPal is the fastest way to open your doors to over 150 million member accounts worldwide.
