Digital Home Thoughts: Dymo's DiscPainter: Shock and Awe Disc Printing

DYMO isn’t just about printing shipping labels any longer: at CES 2008 I saw their DiscPainter product, which is a dedicated disc printer. It doesn't print labels; instead, it prints directly on CDs and DVDs designed for printing. I have a DYMO LabelWriter 330, and it saves me a bunch of time, so I was interested in checking out this new product. Since my Epson R1800 prints on discs - but is a bit of a hassle to set up for disc printing - I was curious if this $249 product (available from Amazon.com) brought anything new to the game so I requested one for review. Unpacking the nicely-designed box, I found the usual: a quick start guide, a software CD, a registration card, three glossy and water-resistant optimized-for-printing blank CDs, an ink cartridge, the power adaptor and power cable, a USB cable, and the printer itself. The software install was uneventful, though I was disappointed to see both a Vista UAC (User Account Control) prompt and the installation of Quicktime without my permission. I find Quicktime to be poorly designed, intrusive software that I only install if I absolutely have to. Even after the install I'm unsure of exactly why Quicktime was required.

The printer itself looks great; it's small and unobtrusive, easily fitting underneath my monitor on a monitor stand. The design is modern and sleek, and the printer is will spit out a disc in three minutes when it's set to the highest quality mode. Where the hardware design falls down is print quality; the prints just don't look as good as I thought they would based on the marketing materials. It's a bit confusing actually, because when I saw this product at CES, the promotional materials said it did 1200 dpi printing, so I was expecting great quality prints. Instead, the disc prints I did were quite grainy. When I asked the Dymo PR person about this, I was informed that the printer was no longer marketed as having 1200 dpi print quality, with 600 dpi being the new quality number, and that I must have had an older box that referenced the 1200 dpi printing. If that's the case, I have to wonder why the DYMO product page still references 1200 dpi-quality printing.

Regardless of what I was being told, the proof is in the product: here's what a 1200dpi best-quality print looks like. Notice the lack of uniform blocks of colour; every photo has speckles and colour banding. This looks worse than what a 600 dpi laser printer could do, yet amazingly the 600dpi normal print manages to look even worse. Since it seemed to have a hard time with photos, what about some semi-abstract line art? While it looks a bit better, visible lines are everywhere throughout the image. In fact, it looks like what an inkjet printer with clogged print heads spits out. The Dymo PR rep I was dealing with sent me a new ink cartridge, but the results were no better; using one of the included default templates gave me an image riddled by streaks. I wasn't impressed.

The included software, Discus for Dymo, offers some neat features such as automatic collage creation and the ability to save a disc design to an image file, but for the most part I found the software unintuitive and strangely restrictive. Perhaps the fact that it looks like it's a Mac application is a hint as to its origins and why I find it unintuitive. There's also a software component that loads with Windows to monitor the printer status, but having it running all the time only uses up memory - there's really no reason why you'd need to have it running all the time. I can't blame DYMO too much for this though; Epson does the same thing.

So what can you print with the DYMO DiscPainter? Almost every full-colour image I tried turned out looking quite bad, yet sometimes the images would turn out OK. I consider this sample a rare exception though and not the rule. Plain, text-based discs print just fine, and they look good enough. But does someone drop $250 on a product that's only good at printing discs with a bit of text on them? I doubt it. DYMO shows all these great-looking, full-colour discs in all their marketing materials for this product, yet the product itself seems woefully unable to measure up to the marketing hype. No matter what I tried with the DYMO DiscPainter, the results were inferior to what a sub-$100 Epson printer can accomplish - which is exactly what I recommend someone purchase if they're looking for a basic disc-printing solution. The DYMO DiscPainter simply doesn't deliver results good enough to justify its cost. If this were a $79 printer I'd be more forgiving, but at $249 it's in the range of prosumer printers. DYMO can do better, and so can you - take a pass on this product.

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys photography, mobile devices, blogging, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He likes things that print on other things.

Do you enjoy using new hardware, software and accessories, then sharing your experience with others? Then join us on the Thoughts Media Review Team! We're looking for individuals who find it fun to test new gear and give their honest opinions about the experience. It's a volunteer role with some great perks. Interested? Then click here for more information.