By: Erik Vlietinck
Wed, February 27, 2008 - 10:42:00
Pros: Small footprint, fast, high quality output, consumes little ink, can print on matte, glossy and metallic ink-taking disc surfaces
Contras: Included design software Discus is not state-of-the-art, sample files don't include QuarkXPress 7 files

http://www.dymo.com
Score:

Before you can start producing a CD or DVD for content distribution, you will have gone a long way. Somewhere along the way, at the start of the production process you will have decided on a design for the packaging and the medium label. Your decision about the design of the packaging --the box-- and its colours, and the design of the disc label, will have been influenced by the customer’s demands and the content type.

You will start with a brain storm, then create a first draft of your ideas, perhaps drawn on a paper napkin, and then transfer that rough sketch to a digital draft in Adobe Illustrator or another graphic design application. And when you are finished fine-tuning your original idea, the time will have come to create a mock-up of the packaging, the graphics for the box and the design of the label.

Unless you are going through this process as an employee at a large advertising or design firm, the chances are that you will be using a system such as the Jewelboxing system to create the mock-up of the packaging graphics and the disc label. In the distant past, you would have used a paper label to create the mock-up for the disc label design. Today, you could also opt for a direct to CD/DVD print system such as what you can get from Epson, Canon and HP Direct-To-Disc printers. And only recently, you can also go for a Dymo DiscPainter.

The Dymo DiscPainter is a new device for printing directly on a CD or DVD label-side surface. It is an inkjet printer, but it works totally different from what you’re used when seeing an inkjet in action. Instead of printing the disc as it would print a photo --from top to bottom-- the DiscPainter rotates the disc while spraying its ink onto the surface.

The difference is quite obvious, both in terms of speed and output quality. What I observed was that DiscPainter doesn’t deposit as much ink onto the disc surface as a traditional inkjet printer, not even when it is printing in the highest possible quality mode. It is also faster. Compared to an average Epson, it takes about half the time to finish the printing process. As far as I could tell, this dramatic time savings isn’t as much the result of the DiscPainter printing faster, as it is of the printer being capable to start printing immediately when the disc compartment is closed.

A Dozen Quality / Type Levels to Choose from

The quality that DiscPainter is capable of is certainly good enough. There are about a dozen quality levels in total to choose from (combining both media type and print quality level) and those cover all possible needs. In the lowest quality (Draft), you will see clear banding, but even in average quality modes, the discs are covered without noticeable banding at all. Colours are vibrant in the highest quality settings, both on matte and glossy type surfaces.

Because DiscPainter doesn’t deposit a thick layer of ink onto the disc’s surface, the drying times are less than with an Epson R260. Practically speaking, the discs are dry to the touch as soon as you open the disc compartment. A nice side-effect of the DiscPainter being careful with ink is that glossy surfaces keep most of their glossy nature, even with full-surface designs.

Another nice side-effect is the ink cartridge doesn’t deplete as fast as with an average photo inkjet printer. Dymo claims you can print up to 100 discs with one cartridge. And yes, there’s only one cartridge for all the colours.

The DiscPainter takes up about as much space as two DVD jewel boxes laid next to each other and is approximately as high as two 25-disc spindles loaded on top of each other. The device has a nice metallic grey finish, with a front loader that opens at the top --a bit like CD-players when music CDs first came out. The ink and printing mechanism are housed in the highest and bulkiest part of the DiscPainter. The disc is positioned in the tray, the tray is closed, and when printing starts, the disc is visibly --there’s a large clear plastic window built-in-- “swallowed” by the system. Then slowly the disc is pushed to the the front of the disc compartment again, all the while rotating at a fairly slow speed.

You can actually see the colours of your design build up through the clear plastic window --very nice.

Leopard Compatible Printer Driver: Download!

The DiscPainter connects to your computer with a USB 2 cable --in this case, a thick cable that Dymo says must be used as some other so-called USB 2 cables aren’t capable of the throughput speeds required by the DiscPainter.

When running Leopard, DiscPainter owners must immediately download the latest driver from Dymo’s web site, as the one in the box is already outdated. The driver works great. It allows the system and all applications to see the DiscPainter as any other printer. This also implies you can use DiscPainter with any program capable of printing to custom-paper sizes of 120 mm x 120 mm. Mac OS X users will find Discus to be automatically installed when installing the DiscPainter software included with the device.

This version of Discus is a special one, in that it supports DiscPainter’s many quality and surface type modes. However, the driver itself has settings for all these preferences as well, so you can do without Discus if you don’t like the program. I myself found Discus to be just as ugly and under-featured as it has been for several years now, in my opinion at least. And so, I was very happy to see a folder inside the DiscPainter application folder that holds sample files for InDesign, Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator. Unfortunately, the QuarkXPress 7 samples which the Dymo web site mentions, aren’t included.

Using the samples in Illustrator, for example, is very straightforward. In reality, the sample files are nothing more than a file with the correct paper size and some guides added to them. They’re very useful, nevertheless. I never used Discus to actually print a test design at all.