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CD Printing Iain Laskey looks at the options for CD Printing Until recently, creating a nice professional looking CD or DVD at home was a bit hit and miss. The choices were to either buy a labelling kit or to splash out on an expensive professional printer designed for the task. Happily, times have moved on and there are now lots of options to play with. Labelling The traditional method for producing a neat looking CD by home users has been the labelling kit. Early versions were both fiddly to use and came with software that was basic to put it kindly. Newer version are rather more sophisticated and come with adaptors to aid accurate placement and fairly sophisticated software that allows far more scope for creativity. Neato and Pressit are the market leaders here. See our recent review of the Fellowes CD/DVD Labelling Kit for an example. Modern labelling software is quite sophisticated and will do things like read the track names from an Audio CD saving you the laborious task of typing them by hand. Text can be wrapped around the edge, full colour background images employed and more.
Whilst most CDs are fine with labels, very fast CD drives and most DVD drives can have problems. It’s quite difficult spinning a CD reliably at 50X and adding a label can introduce unacceptable levels of vibration if it’s not put on exactly right. Any slight deviation can cause the CD to wobble so badly as to be unusable and in extreme conditions can actually damage the drive. Anecdotal evidence exists of CDs actually shattering inside the drives although one would hope the label would hold some of the bits together afterwards at least. General opinion is that labels on DVDs is a no-no too although some people have reported success. In these situations, it is better to print directly to the CD or DVD. TDK Printer TDK caused a stir when they released a dedicated CD/DVD printer last year. With a growing range costing around £65-£100 they provide an easy way to produce printed disks. The LPCW50-UK is the basic model with the LPCW-100-UK offering higher resolution printing for producing legible smaller text. Both are mono only although you can put in different colour ribbons to add a bit of variety although only one colour can be used on any given CD or DVD. Inkjet Printers There have been a few inkjet printers that could print to a CD but they normally attracted a premium price. Recent models such as the Epson R200 (£90) or the Canon i865 (£140) are both capable of producing excellent full colour results with the Canon being particularly well received in this role. You do require special inkjet printable CDs or DVDs to make use of these printers though. Mostly these are white but there have been some with different base colours so it’s worth shopping around if you want to add a little extra to the final product. Silver ones can particularly effective when combined with a well designed print layout.
It’s wise to double check your printers exact requirements as there are two types of printable CD. In many cases both will work but some printers are fussier than others. The two types are hard and soft substrate and vendors don’t always make it clear what you’re getting although the soft ones tend to be slightly more expensive. Bulk Printers If your pockets are deeper and you need to print a lot more CDs, perhaps producing a home made CD for a band then you may want to consider printers that can handle more than one CD at a time. For a mere £700 or so you can buy a modified Epson A3 printer that can print 6 CDs or DVDs at a time. The CopyTrax DaVinci Pro CD Printer has a 2880dpi printing system and comes with a special 6 CD/DVD tray. It is also a fine photo and text printer and with its A3 size could be just the thing for someone with diverse printing needs. It also comes with sophisticated software for the design and layout of the disks. It’s worth shopping around with units like this as they often come bundled with other useful extras and the prices can vary quite widely. There are printers capable of far higher throughput but that’s in the £3000+ region for devices that can be left to print 150 CDs without any user intervention. Conclusion If you’re creating CDs or DVDs for distribution, whether to friends and family or for sale, it creates a far better impression if they look the part rather than having the title scrawled with a (CD safe!) pen. Whether you want to use labels or a printer of some sort, the range of available options now means you can produce great results for less outlay than ever before.
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