DVD Inkjet Printing - Burn before Labeling?
 

One of my clients hasn't finished recording their music, but they wanted the CD's already printed beforehand, since the design for the labels are done. That way, they could speed up the whole process and immediately burn onto ready-made CD's once the music was done mixing.

According to the Epson R200 manual, one should burn the data onto the CD/DVD (video, mp3s, etc.) before printing onto the disc. Is this really necessary? I'd like to please my clients and have the discs ready for them, but I also don't want to have any errors while burning (if printing the label beforehand will cause problems). Can someone share any personal experience with this? Thanks!

Allan,

As long as you are careful I don't see any reason it wouldn't be fine. The book points out that you don't want to scratch them before printing and of course this is true and just plain logical. So handle with care as always. The printing should not interfer with the burning, after I've had blank CDs that came with labels already on them.

One other consideration is that you want to make sure that the ink has fully dried before handling them and putting them in the burner. Your customer probably knows, like you do, that the ink dries rather slow, and so it will save maybe a day, if you print them ahead of time.

One other note, if you are new to printing on printable CDs and DVDs, make sure that your inner and outer ring sizes for the printer are set within the boundries of the printable area of the blank. If your printing goes out of this area, the ink basically never dries, and will come off onto your fingers and anything else it touches.

Good Luck!

Mike

I would guess it is more for the fact that if the burning process has a mistake, you wasted ink and time.

Personally I would wait but if you let them know about the possibility of errors with burning (for whichever reason) and reprints and they are ok with it, go for it.

I've done this before, and just finished a run of a dozen DVD-Rs printed on an Epson R800.

Since burning/verifying a full DVD-R at 8x speed takes longer than printing, I don't see the time saved. Even if you don't verify, burning takes much longer than printing. There is a potential issue with dry time, so I let the DVDs sit overnight before handling.

As a note, I did have some trouble with printing before burning. For some reason, two of my disks left large visible gaps. This may have been an issue with media, but who knows ?

Either printing or burning can have errors, but good ink probably costs you more than the disk. As Kyle recommends, you're better off burning before printing.

Kyle/Gints: good point about the ink being more expensive and costly; that's what I felt as well.

For this particular job, however, printing before burning does save time, because the music won't be finished mixing for another couple of weeks, if not another month. My clients had hoped that the printed CD's would all be labeled within this time-span, so drying isn't an issue, and they'd have prepared discs to burn for them.

I'm gonna take your guys' advice and hold off on all the printing. If anything, I'll print maybe 10 discs. Thanks for all your input!

It is definately a trade-off, but! The disks are supposed to dry for twenty four hours, but you can burn a lot of disks in that time. It really works out OK for printing ahead of time! I still don't see that the printing will mess up the burning. Just keep your fingers off of the disk!

Mike

I also did this recently for a client and they had no problem burning after labeling. But I suspect the above reasons for burning and then printing are valid: it's too easy to scratch the discs during handling, printing, drying and returning to the spindle. Also, if they aren't dried completely, maybe ink could transfer from the label side onto the optical side? I use the Epson R200 and notice it takes a LONG time to dry! Looks great, tho!

Oh -- I forgot to mention -- I wouldn't recommend applying stick-on printed labels before burning, for a couple of reaons: 1) the disc spins faster while burning and the label might cause out-of-balance problems and 2) they peel off too easily. But I don't think the stick-on adhesive labels are very popular anymore and I know that's not the method you're using -- just thought I'd mention it, just in case someone else is contemplating it.