OT: Epson CD printer

I just bought an Epson Stylus Photo R300 from www.newegg.com for
$127.50, with a mail-in rebate that brings the cost down to $107.00
(USD). It includes a tray for printing on CD's or DVD's; the kind you
can get now with the white printable surface, which was the main reason
I was interested in it.

I've been buying a lot of music on iTunes lately, and it makes me
nervous (as a pre-21st Century geezer) to be storing all my new music
purchases as fungible computer files with copyright restrictions. I'm a
die-hard supporter of copyright to protect artists, but not necessarily
Apple's implementation of this. I feel safer if music I purchase from
iTunes is burned to a CD, so I can rip it back as .wav files to burn
onto a "real" audio CD for archival storage. And to play in my truck CD
player, dammit!

Anyway... for the last 6 months since buying into the whole iTunes
thing, I've been burning CD's with white writable surfaces, and using a
Sharpie to identify the content. I finally got fed up with the haphazard
look of that, so I got this Epson printer thing. It's more time-
consuming than a sharpie. You have to use the included graphics software
to set up the text, but I can actually list tracks and song titles, and
frankly it's easier to read with my aging eyes. I can even use different
graduated color schemes or background images to categorize the CD's.

One reason I'm mentioning this here, is that the output looks a lot more
professional than stick-on paper labels if you're selling your own music
in CD format. It doesn't quite pass for a commercial CD because it's a
matte surface, but at least it prints all the way out to the edge, with
no white border. I've heard that you can spray these things with 3M
artwork fixative to get a shinier surface, but I haven't tried it.

The printer has some downsides. The tray the CD loads on is pretty
flimsy and I wonder how long it will last. Each CD takes about a minute
to print, so it will be a long night if you want to print a run of
several hundred CD's. For any sophisticated artwork, you'll want
something more than the supplied CD printer program. And like all inkjet
printers, the hardware is really just a snare to get you hooked into
buying ink cartridges.

There are better CD printers out there if you need more reliability and
high-volume output, but hey... for roughly $110 USD, this is pretty
amazing.

P.S. oh yeah, it does a nice job of printing photos too, if you use the
right paper.

Mike Barrs

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: OT: Epson CD printer
    ... with a mail-in rebate that brings the cost down to $107.00 (USD). ... It includes a tray for printing on CD's or DVD's; the kind you can get now with the white printable surface, which was the main reason I was interested in it. ...
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