Thursday, February 28, 2008
DYMO's DiscPainter: Making Your CDs and DVDs
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 12:00 PM
"With the DYMO® DiscPainter™ CD/DVD printer, you no longer need to worry about the hassle of using sticky labels or potentially damaging your media with labels that peel off the disc. You also won’t feel embarrassed by your illegible handwriting from using a marker to label your disc. Best of all, you don’t have to deal with hard-to-use trays and machines that take up a lot of space at your desk. The DiscPainter™ offers you the best system to print directly onto discs in a quick and easy way. Whether you are giving a presentation to a client, pitching your design portfolio or sharing your music and photos, you can create and print out impressive-looking discs in no time. Use the included software to develop your own designs or print from your favorite design application like Adobe® Photoshop® or Illustrator®."
I have a DYMO LabelWriter Turbo 330, and it's an incredibly useful tool for me - the ability to get a shipping label printed in under 10 seconds, from start to finish, is amazing. So with that in mind, when I saw the DiscPainter at CES 2008 in January, I was quite excited - I have an Epson R1800 that prints on CDs and DVDs, but it's not always easy or practical to fire it up (and the computer it's attached to) in order to print on a disc. And in North America at least, neither Canon nor HP printers can print on optical discs (some sort of royalty or patent issues I believe). The DiscPainter looks like an impressive solution, cranking out a 600 dpi print in 60 seconds, or a 1200 dpi print in three minutes. I saw some sample prints at CES and they looked fantastic - very professional.
I'm a little less impressed with DYMO's software development abilities however - it took them months to get a Windows Vista-compatible version of their LabelWriter software out - so I'm not sure how good the included software is. Apparently you can print from Photoshop and several other programs, so that mitigates that problem somewhat. The price of $279 USD seems a bit steep, and the replacement ink cartridge is $39 which prints about 100 discs, so this is not for the light-of-wallet. But hey, no one ever said that looking good was cheap...
I have a DYMO LabelWriter Turbo 330, and it's an incredibly useful tool for me - the ability to get a shipping label printed in under 10 seconds, from start to finish, is amazing. So with that in mind, when I saw the DiscPainter at CES 2008 in January, I was quite excited - I have an Epson R1800 that prints on CDs and DVDs, but it's not always easy or practical to fire it up (and the computer it's attached to) in order to print on a disc. And in North America at least, neither Canon nor HP printers can print on optical discs (some sort of royalty or patent issues I believe). The DiscPainter looks like an impressive solution, cranking out a 600 dpi print in 60 seconds, or a 1200 dpi print in three minutes. I saw some sample prints at CES and they looked fantastic - very professional.
I'm a little less impressed with DYMO's software development abilities however - it took them months to get a Windows Vista-compatible version of their LabelWriter software out - so I'm not sure how good the included software is. Apparently you can print from Photoshop and several other programs, so that mitigates that problem somewhat. The price of $279 USD seems a bit steep, and the replacement ink cartridge is $39 which prints about 100 discs, so this is not for the light-of-wallet. But hey, no one ever said that looking good was cheap...
