Where to buy cases/blanks
 

I've bought my past couple sets of discs from some yahoo.com affiliated site and they've been alright, but don't have any higher quality stuff that I think I want. I'd love some glossy inkjet printable discs and some "hollywood" quality cases and inserts. Any recommendations? I can't find anywhere online that sells the whole kit and kaboodle in the US. I've found a site or two in the UK that sells some stuff, but that shipping would be insane!

You can try Discmakers at www.discmakers.com I just brought 1,000 Ridata inkjet hub printable discs from Newegg.com There's also CDDVDR Media they are an Yahoo.com affiliate.

I used http://www.shop4tech.com/ for my first orders recently (printable DVD's and DVD cases and DVD mailers)

observations:

- the DVD's seem to work fine.
- the glue on the DVD mailers is completely insufficient and I have to add tape to get them to seal properly
- the plastic on the DVD cases is of minimal quality.

I did generally go for the cheapest options though.

I've been very happy with www.supermediastore.com

I'm using inket-printable Taiyo-Yuden DVDs and CDs for audio, plus Phillips inkjet-printable DVDs with great success. They also have a full line of cases and consumables.

I also like their brand of inkjet cartridges in my Epson R-200 printer. Never a problem with them and they are CHEAP.

I'd been using supermediastore.com , but the cases feel of very low quality and their shipping is outrageous. Are the T-Y discs preferred? I'd never heard of that brand until recently, and now it seems they're the only brand anyone ever uses. What I'd really love are some DVD cases that are of the same quality and durability of the ones you get when you buy a Hollywood movie. Also where do you get your DVD inserts I really want some glossy DVDs and glossy inserts. The matte stuff looks very unprofessional to me

Taiyo Yuden manufactures some of the best DVD media available. See the Blank media quality guide & FAQ for more information on the quality of various DVD media manufacturers.

Well because I have a project coming up, so I ordered again from supermediastore.com (ridiculous shipping costs though) I ordered TY discs, so hopefully they work good for me. I have an Epson R320 and I lost the disc that came with it. It supposedly came with software for designing disc prints, but I don't know if that was for OSX anyway.

For those of you using macs, what do you use to design your discs that will print from your computer over the entire disc? What I've been doing was designing the disc in photoshop and exporting it as a photo, puting that on a memory card and printing directly from my printer. It works, but the epson will not print the full face of the disc, only the standard ring (not the inner part that is just plastic on non-full hub discs) any recommendations? Thanks so much so far for your advice guys.

I have been playing with this:

http://www.smileonmymac.com/DiscLabel/

However, I am not certain it will let you print on the whole DVD (you get to enter "inner/outer" diameter though, so I suspect it might.

I got the Epson R320? or R340 -- forget which and after 5 or so tries with the alignment, got mine to work with my DVD's (the calibration process did not seem to give me effective results with the app -- I had to resort to mostly guesswork to get it aligned)

I second the vote for DiscLabel. I didn't have any problems with alignment printing on an Epson R220. For some reason the Page Setup needs to be on "A4" instead of "letter," but that's set by default and everything prints perfectly centered for me. It will print a picture over the entire surface, and is MUCH easier to use than Epson's software.

-Terence

The calibration thing for me was very odd.
I printed the calibration sheet and measured my offsets at 22mm horiz and vert, so 2mm different than the baseline.

however, entering 22mm as my offsets clearly was wrong (nothing was centered correctly). Putting it back to 20mm did the trick. There is still a teeny alignment issue where it looks like the DVD prints are a fraction of a mm off -- I may play with it a bit more.

However, the s/w is pretty easy to use so far (limited use) and I was even able to make DVD slipcases (although sometimes the editor can be a little frustrating to use).

I'd definitely recommend it. the company seems really friendly too (famous last words I know :)

I'm not on a Mac, but I have been using Photoshop along with this Epson Stylus 960 Photoshop template to design my labels that I print on my DVDs using an Epson R320. Even though the template was for a Stylus 960 it worked just fine printing to the R320.

When I first used hub printable DVDs I modified the template to allow me to mask the center of the disk as needed with different mask layers for hub printable disks and non-hub printable disks. I have attached my modified template to this post. Epson included printing instructions in the Stylus 960 template download which I linked to above.