I'm looking into professionally printing CD's, as in the labels on top and all that. Now I want to know if anyone has done this before, and if so what company did you use and what do you suggest? I would want to have about 25 - 50 CD-R's printed (not replicated/duplicated!) with a full 4 colour design. It would be easy if I could buy the (printed) packaging from them too. So, anyone any info on this?
Just what I was gonna say, I've got one (R200) and its absolutlely fabulous! R200 costs about £70 and R300 about £80
I've got an R200 too, and the results are fantastic, but I would remind you that to get professional results you'd need a) professional double sided glossy paper, which is hard to find, and expensive b) time consuming - you need to print every page and each CD which at a guess would take about 5 minutes per CD + Label, and then cut out and fold each part of the label (and if you muck it up they will look rubbish), and c) probably more than one set of ink cartridges, which run at £60 for the full set (yep, SIXTY pounds, even if you get third party ones). I was thinking about doing this, and eventually just didn't bother, got them done professionally for about a pound a CD in England inc. duplication - dunno if the company I used would print onto blank CDRs but I could dig out the information if you're interested. AH
It takes less than 5 minutes to do mine, and my third party set of ink caridges (full set of 6) cost me £60, but I have to say the third party inks I use are excellent quality, I cannot see any quality difference from the original whatsoever, and the inks last a hell of a long time. I printed over 100 colour pages for my courswork, and ink levels only went down by 10%, so you can print well over 1000 pages!
Did you misread my post about third party - I said £60 EVEN IF you get third party ones - it sounded like you were saying I was wrong, but you were just agreeing with me...? Re the ink thing: I dunno what you're doing for coursework but I can't think of anything that would be covering pages in ink, and it seems likely you'd have lots of writing with charts/images/diagrams - that would take up a LOT less ink than a set of CD inserts covered in full colour, on glossy paper that requires more ink. I would guess to print 100 full colour CD inserts plus each CD, with minimal white space on each would probably use one set of cartridges, depending on the colours used - maybe it would only use up the blues, but use more if it was a predominantly blue design, etc. And 5 minutes was an estimate including loading the CD and the paper (glossy paper sticks together so you need to insert it one page at a time in my experience), and cutting the paper to insert size, plus scoring/folding and "assembly". Glossy printing takes a long time, as does CD printing. AH
guys, i got 3rd party refils for my R200 at a computer fair for £16 for a whole set the other day, and this is how much i usually pay! ...maybe i should stick some on the trade forum
Got an R200 and bought a continuos ink system for it, £60 odd and each chamber stores about 100-200ml When you say "profesionally" do you mean you want to start a small business for bands or sell on ebay etc? or do you want to make lables for you own collection to look "professional"? If its the first one then you should use a professional place to do it, there must be an online place that does it, or maybe you could just look in you yocal Yellow Pages for Printing firms etc. If you are offering a proffesional result to people, personally i'd expect it to look as good as or better than a cd youd buy from Play or HMV and last as long too. TBH a home printer aint gonna cut it compared to the real thing, especially if it gets used a lot and left on desks and rattling around in gloveboxes... As a lot of them do!
Everything apart from the underside of the cd is as good or better quality than you'd find in a professional cd. AH
i recently came acrros these cd that you burn the data on then you flip them over and burn a lable on them. try looking for thoses
I'm pretty sure they only burn to black, and i dont think the quality is particularly spiffy. It's quite a clever solution, though AH
Yeah well, it's for the software I'll be selling, so it must look as professional as any software CD.
Yeah, it's called lightscribe if i recall correctly. Think it takes a while to write the label though. You need a compatible burner too not just disks, some can do it just with a firmware upgrade.
