OT - suggest an osX friendly printer that prints ON DVDs?

looking for suggestions on a printer thats osX friendly that prints ON printable DVDs

I use the Epson R200 which has a thingy for printing DVDs. Works fine.

Michael Horton
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Or the R300; works fine, too.

One note: You do need to buy 'printable' DVDs; I don't believe you can print on just any media.

Ritek Ridata printable DVDs seem to me and others to be reliable.

I have an Epson 960 that does a good job printing on DVDs when the print head isn't clogged, which unfortunately isn't the case at the moment. Epsons have that tendency if you don't print something with them regularly, because the nozzles are in the head, not the cartridges as HP does. But I've not heard of any DVD printers that aren't Epsons.

Scott

R200 *and* R300, PCs *and* Macs here. And they do work reasonably well. However.

In the early days, these machines had a lot of trouble with the DVD Carriage wearing out, cracking, and getting misaligned. Many new carriages were issued and I haven't heard any trouble since. It was revealed that Epson was horrified when everyone immediately went out and bought R series printers to print thousands of DVD labels--like we tried to do.

"It wasn't designed to do that," they wimpered. They went on to say that this series was designed to be an excellent paper printer (it is) that had one or two CD prints a month built in for the casual user (it does).

They inadvertantly fell into the intense vacuum of thousands of people needing thousands of CDs printed every week.

That and it's slow. You can go surf eBay waiting for this thing to finish a (very good) label.

You know the built-in software doesn't print to the edges (full bleed) right? It leaves a white ring. That and it doesn't print to the middle on full-white CDs--although they may have fixed that. I don't know of any way to print directly from Photoshop like we do on our CD paper printer (one reason we're still using paper).

Outside of that......

Koz

I have an R200 at home that wore out its disc carriage tray along with my patience so i just picked up a new replacement for it(R220), $20 more than the price of ink. It did last through lots of discs and the newer model seems more rugged on the disc tray aspect. The R800 i have at work is much faster and better but i believe is discontinued.

As far as printing to edges, as crappy as the software is(Epson PrintCD), it does do that. You have to customize your inner/outer dimensions and calibrate it so its dead center, both options in the menus. I use 21mm/119mm on full white hubprintable dvds and they look great, better than what i get from dub houses.

thanks guys! ever since i moved to osx (what, almost 3 years now?) my epson stylus photo 1280
has totally lost its borderless printing functionality. so im willing to toss it and go with anything that openly embraces osX...

I got my Epson r320 some months ago and have printed upwards of a hundred dvds with no problem. It is certainly not a high-volume printer...the fact you have to load each DVD and print one at a time proves that. But I do like the quality. BTW, I've found supermediatstore a good place to get both blank DVD's (I like the Taiyo brand) and off brand replacement cartridges for the Epson (the only gripe about this printer is it won't print if even one of the six cartridges is empty).

I have R210 - its a machine!

Would estimate mine does 500 CD/DVDs a month. Its three years old now, have bought a new CD tray (Epson refused to give me one for free even inside warranty), but now does seriously good work.

That combined with the fact I can get 18 cartridges from a supplier on eBay for A$52, as opposed to A$20 each at Officeworks, makes it by far the most useful and economical printer I've ever used - ever.

Can't recommend highly enough. Only bugbear was running it on a network when I was having Tiger/Panther compatibility issues - now good as gold.

J.

Hi J:

How about a link to those cheapo cartridges from that Ebay supplier? The Epson ones are killing me on cost.

Best,

Dan

This is the guy I get mine from - he does a variety of different packages etc so just check his list - no affiliation with me at all either guys! I've ordered from him 3 times with no problems. My dad has ordered 2 other different types of cartridges from him. Quick, cheap and friendly.

[cgi.ebay.com.au]

Hope posting an eBay link doesn't contravene LAFCPUG rule

Justin.

I bought a "Continuous Ink Supply System Kit For Epson" for my R300 from the company in the UK, where I get my DVD media from. You can get similar CISS kits from ebay.

[www.bigpockets.co.uk]

Try Meritline for the Ritek Ridata printable DVD's and for ink cartridges.
I have had great success using them for the past 3 years.
[www.meritline.com]

Matt Murray
Lineside Productions
[www.edgesportfishing.com]
Fishing videos, DVD Production, Websites and more.

thank you all for your input. i ended up wth an epson r260. it was like $130 and does a great job.

hey wayne,
i have been using the epson r300 for like a year or so. works great prints directly to the cd.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Our r300 and r320 have a slight misalignment problem since we went to Tiger. Very weird and completely un-fixable. No adjustments in the software, firmware or OS have the slightest effect on the problem. All printing to disks (paper printing is fine) is about 10mm off center up on both x and y axes. We use the darned thing on the darned PC for printing on disks.

bogiesan