Digital Home Thoughts: The Epson R200 and Printable CDs: I've Seen the Light, and It's not Scribe!

As regular readers of Digital Media Thoughts know, I'm a big fan of HP's LightScribe technology. Or I should say, I was. I've had a sort of technological epiphany. During my frothing-at-the-mouth about my LightScribe burner, a reader named Gordo made a comment in the forums about printable CDs:

"I will stick with my $100 CDN (from Future Shop) Epson printer that prints directly (in colour) on to the disk. Printable disks are still inexpensive, and easy to find in stores. Supplied application for printing on CD's works nicely out of the box, no additional drivers to download."

I'll admit it - I scoffed at the idea. An Epson printer printing onto CDs? That's nowhere near as cool as LightScribe, right? I haven't had an Epson printer since the late '90s and tended to favour Canon printers. So I had never printed onto a CD, and figured that since neither HP nor Canon printers had this feature, it must be a gimmick. People, let me tell you, I was so wrong. A few months ago when the wowcoolneat factor of the LightScribe CDs wore off, I started thinking about what Gordo said and looked into the printable CD concept a bit further. I learned a few things: first, it seems that HP and Canon printers in other parts of the world do print to CDs - it's only in Canada and the US that they do not. There's some sort of a patent issue that makes Epson the only CD printing option in North America.

My local Best Buy had a $40 rebate on the Epson R200, so I picked it up for a mere $99 Canadian. I figured for that price, I didn't have much to lose if my experiment was a failure. Around the same time I bought a Canon M780 printer/fax/scanner combo unit, and I still had my much-loved Canon i950 hooked up. I did a little experiment and printed the same photo on the same paper on each printer. The results surprised me! The i950's output was surprisingly yellow, something I had never noticed before, but it was obviously so when compared to the output of the Canon MP780. The R200 had the best output of the lot with nicely balanced colours and realistic flesh tones, which is saying a lot for a $99 printer. So as a photo printer, it impressed me.

What about the CD printing? Well, this is where the R200 really impressed me. I picked up two kinds of printable CDs: ones with a silver finish, and ones with a matte white finish. I wasn't sure what I was expecting as I loaded the CD into the tray to get it printed on - I had to fight with the R200 a bit to get it to print on the CD because it kept giving me errors - but the end result was very much worth it. See for yourself below (click on the image for a much larger version):



The detail was extremely impressive, especially on the white matte. The silver finish gives a nice effect, and would be very impressive with a single large image as the background. Colour saturation and vibrancy was excellent, and you can make out a good amount of detail on even the smallest image. What about the cost? As of today, silver finish printable CDs at a local vendor cost about 30 cents each when bought in packs of 100. The same brand of CDs in non-printable format cost 16 cents. So while they're more expensive, 30 cents a disc falls into the "really cheap" threshold, especially when compared to the pricey LightScribe CDs that are well over a buck each (if you can even find them). The real benefit over LightScribe is that the DVDs look every bit as good as the CDs, unlike the horrible results I saw from burning onto a LightScribe DVD.

Overall, the Epson R200 is an impressive photo printer, especially given the price point. I'm fully sold on the printable CD concept, and can only shake my head at the fact that Canon and HP printers in North America lack this awesome feature. If you create photo and video discs with any degree of frequency, having directly printed on discs gives you all the vibrancy of colour labels with the safety of LightScribe technology, all for a reasonable cost. Impressive indeed!

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Alberta, Canada.