Labeling DVDs and Compact Discs With a CD Printer

Low-cost inkjet CD printers make music sales more affordable to musicians than getting glass-master CDs pressed.

Michael David Crawford
michael@geometricvisions.com

April 4, 2006

Note: This is a rough draft. It should be complete in the next week or so, so please bookmark the page so you can read it when I'm done. It will have a Creative Commons license once the final draft is posted.

To get more people to know my music, in December of 2005 I started burning and giving away as many copies of my album Geometric Visions as I could afford. The folks at the Fair Trade Country Cafe here in Truro were wonderfully helpful to me in agreeing to pass out my CD at the counter. They also hold an Open Mic every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night. Their support of local musicians is contributing in a big way to the arts renaissance that is taking place here in Truro.

I print a nice CD case insert on my inkjet printer, but was never happy happy with how I labeled the CDs themselves: with a felt-tip pen. I wrote as neatly as I can, but it didn't look very professional.

I looked into getting glass-master compact discs pressed. I was quoted a dollar thirty Canadian apiece to have them made in quantities of a thousand, plus some setup charges. The per-unit price for lower quantities was so much higher that there was just no way I could really afford getting my CD manufactured.

CD/DVD Printers

Epson Stylus R220 Photo Printer
Buy at Amazon.com

At the same time, Fair Trade's manager Ray Merriam, who was a marketing consultant before he helped his daughter start their cafe, repeatedly urged me to sell my CDs instead of giving them away. He felt that those who paid money for my music would value it more than those who didn't have to pay.

I gave it away because I thought it was to my advantage to get more people listening to my music, people who might later buy tickets or the glass-master CDs I will someday publish, but I couldn't argue with the fact that it was costing me quite a lot of money to buy the blanks and cases and time to burn them. I didn't keep count, but I estimate I gave away about four hundred copies.

What clinched my decision was realizing that by selling my CDs I could offer them in more places than just at the one cafe here in the small town of Truro, and the money I earned would pay back the time that burning them took away from my other work.

But I had a problem: no one would want to pay for a CD that was crudely hand-labeled with a Sharpie. I must purchase a CD printer, but I was dismayed at the cost of the first printers I found when I searched for them, with the leading high-capacity, highly automated models costing thousands of dollars. Surely there must be some kind of inexpensive inkjet printer with a feed mechanism for compact discs?

I kept searching, and found one that I'm now quite stoked to own, and for just a little over a hundred Canadian bucks: the Epson Stylus R220 Photo Printer.

The Epson R220 CD Printer

Note: This being a rough draft, I'm going to stop and post this for now, then continue my work. I'll just say that I'm very pleased with my purchase, the CD labels print beautifully, and my CD can now be purchased for seven bucks apiece at the Fair Trade Country Cafe.

The advantages of the R220 are that it prints CDs at high-resolution, with even six-point text being clear and easy to read. The R220 is also a hexachrome printer, having light cyan and light magenta ink cartridges in addition to yellow, black, and the standard cyan and magenta. What this means is that if you use color management software such as Apple's ColorSync, and graphics applications that support color management, you can ensure that the colors that print on your CDs match what you see on your screen.

Each color is provided by a separate ink cartridge, so that when it runs low, you need only replace the color that is empty, without wasting other colors as with printers that contain more than one color per cartridge.

It seems reliable; I have had no jams or bad prints so far.

A disadvantage is that the ink cartridges are quite small, so I expect I'll have to replace them frequently. The unit also primes its inkjets each time it is powered on, using up a significant amount of ink. My solution is to just keep the power on at all times, which works out OK as the printer has an Energy Star-compliant low-power standby mode.

The printer is not very fast; I'll clock it the next time I make some CDs, but I can say that it wouldn't be practical if I were moving a lot of compact discs. But then if I were I could afford either a manufacturing run or a fancier printer.

There are two main disadvantages: Epson recommends that the ink be allowed to dry for twenty-four hours before the CDs are handled or used in a player. I put my CDs into cases and let them all sit out on a table overnight, with the cases open, before I delivered them to the cafe. However, I tested one CD just a few minutes after I printed it, and didn't find that the ink smeared at all. I expect this will depend on the brand of blank media used.

Finally, Epson recommends that one design and print CDs from their bundled graphic editor CD Print. I understand that their tech support only provides support for CD Print and not the use of any other graphics application. CD Print is fine for labeling personal CDs but does not support color management or any of the features expected by a professional graphic artist. You will likely want to use some other program.

As I have not yet tried any of the Free Software vector graphics editors, and as I was in a real hurry, I used Adobe Illustrator. But Ogg Frog being a Free Software website, I'm going to try out some of the available Free Software graphic editors and write down tips for using them, as well as providing sample documents and templates in SVG and other open graphics formats.

I have a couple quick tips that I picked up from Stephen M. James: you can print from other programs such as Illustrator if you set the Paper Source in the print job dialog to "CD/DVD". Prepare your document with a left margin of 12 millimeters and a top margin of 6 millimeters. Thus, for a 120 mm CD, the center will be at 72 mm from the left and 66 mm from the top.

As I said, this is just a first draft, and there will be more to follow. I plan to discuss other models of CD printers if others can tell me about them. Write me, Michael David Crawford, at michael@geometricvisions.com.

What the Bold Print Giveth, the Fine Print Taketh Away

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So there.