PRIMERA BRAVO OPTICAL PUBLISHING SYSTEM - Page 8

Performance

Printing times and Quality

Using the Sure Thing CD/DVD labeler program, anyone can create his favorite design and print it on disc. As already mentioned, the Bravo Disc Publisher offers four different printing modes for printing at 600dpi, 1200dpi and 2400dpi. We measured the printing times for each mode and the results are illustrated in the following table. Notice that the times represent the total duration of a single printing job, by the time we press the "print" button until the printed disc is placed to the output bin. For this test the Dither Mode was set to "Photo" and all the other printing settings were left to the default values.

Printing in low resolutions is less time consuming but the printing result, as expected, cannot be compared to the output of printing at higher resolutions. The 600dpi Normal mode should be preferred for simple graphical designs and is more acceptable when the alternation of the colors is not continuous. Otherwise, the rasterizing effects are visible and the result is not the best you can obtain. On the other hand, printing at 600dpi is cheaper and saves ink. The overall result, could also be considered as a personal taste and can be validated according to the user's needs. Printing a test disc with a specific design before going on into feeding the unit with multiple printings jobs would definitely lead to the appropriate resolution choice.

The 600dpi Best mode gives a smoother printing result than the Normal mode. According to the selected design, the user can select the "Photo" or "Graphics" dither option and come up with a good overall printing quality. The duration of the print job is approximately 2:20 minutes per disc.

The 1200dpi Presentation mode is the default printing resolution. It is recommended for graphics for fast and high quality results. The duration for a single print job is just 25 seconds higher than the 600dpi Best choice.

Last, the best quality available comes with the 2400dpi Super Photo mode. As you can imagine this mode is optimized for printing photos on your discs, but also gives the best results you can have with any kind of design. The printing process lasted 4:15 min and is the longest we had in the test, but the performance is very high, with colors coming out alive and an overall result of high fidelity.

The printing results can vary widely, according to the type and the manufacturer of the discs you print on. Printing on silver surface may be more suitable in some cases than printing on white discs. Of course, this largely depends on personal taste, but usually graphics look more clear on white-coated discs, where photos seem to require a silver surface for more realistic results.

Full Publishing job

Working with Prassi PrimoDVD2.0 allows any user to burn and print his discs easily and fast. The software seems to collaborate well with the printer and the robotic mechanism is accurate and fast enough.

We created a test job with Primo DVD2.0. This included the recording of 800MB of data at full speed on a blank CD-R and printing on the disc surface at 2400dpi Super Photo mode. The duration of the whole process was 9 minutes. In the following table we give the approximate time values for each phase of the publishing job.

Notice that the above times are not to be considered as absolute values and might vary slightly from job to job. They are presented here in order to give an indication of the different steps involved in the operation of the unit and the partial time-cost of each phase.

What is more interesting, however, is the behavior of the Bravo under a multiple disc-publishing job. The user can take advantage of the "Record and Print Simultaneously" option and save valuable time in a massive publishing process.

We chose to repeat the previous data job with 2 discs. As it was expected, the robotic mechanism loaded the first disc to the recorder and after burning had finished, the disc was loaded on the printer. While printing of disc 1 was ready to start, the second blank disc was loaded on the recorder. Both recording and printing processes started, and finally the disc 1 was placed in the output bin in approximately 8:10 minutes. Printing of disc 2 was finished and the whole job was completed in 11:20 minutes total. As you can see the simultaneous printing and recording makes the publishing job faster and easier.

However, the mechanical design of the robotic arm does not allow printing and disc loading / unloading operations at the same time. As a result, a finished disc is placed in the output bin only after recording of the previous disc is finished. A possible modification in the robotic arm could save even more time when multiple publishing jobs take place.

Ink consumption

Bravo Disc Publisher was surprisingly economic regarding the consumption of both black and color inks. Usually inkjet printers show their weakness in this area and the replacement of the ink cartridges is very usual after some heavy usage, especially when printing in high resolutions. As a reference we could say that we printed more than 50 fully colored discs in all the available resolutions, and the built-in Cartridge Maintenance monitor showed that we could almost print the double number of discs with a single pair of cartridges.