Rimage 360i price lowered

The Rimage 306i’s price has been lowered to $1875 shipping included.

Add comment February 9th, 2006

Publishing Comes of Age

DVD/CD Duplicators with built in printers are not a new thing.  First legitimized by the Cedar Desktop Publisher (later acquired by Rimage Corporation), the desktop publisher made end-to-end disc production possible in a single machine.

 The benefits are somewhat obvious:

· Automation means lights-out operation 

· PC Control of Jobs gives added features such as queuing multiple jobs and merging variable data to the label, and potentially even network access to the machine.

· The right content is burned to the disc with the right printed label - no human error

In certain applications, such as event recording, publishing has been adopted more slowly.  That is because the primary concern of those environments is turnaround time, and publishers are typically 1 or 2 drive systems, creating a production bottleneck as you can only burn two discs at a time. In duplication ministry, for example, churches have always been encouraged to print their discs ahead of time on a separate machine, and then burn in towers with 8, 10, or even 16 drives.

Some of those concerns have been overcome. Applications that were ‘on the edge’ in terms of turnaround times have tipped to the publishing side because recording speeds have increased dramatically.  Not long ago, we were talking about 9 minutes to burn a CD with 650 MB on it.  Now we’re talking about 7 minutes for a 4.7 GB DVD. 

But the tower will always have its place.  Pre-printed discs will still make sense for ‘just-in-time’ fulfillment because print speed itself can be a bottleneck.  The fasteset inkjet printer on the market, the Microboards PF-2, can do a full coverage, full-color CD in a minute - blazing fast by our industry’s standards, but not impressive when compared to office paper color laser printers.  So getting the printing out of the way still makes sense for some. 

The other thing that has helped the tower keep its position as a primary solution for duplication is user friendliness - put your master and blanks in, hit start, and go.  But that benefit is rapidly being eroded by more intuitive software being included with the publishers.

Companies like Rimage and Microboards have deployed software with nicely compartmentalized GUIs - put your burn files here, your print file here, your quantity here, and click start.  Even more user-friendly are the wizards - Rimage starts out by asking you to ‘click on the task of your choice to begin’ and gives you a list with icons, titles, and descriptions that give even the novice user a readable menu - it’s not like trying to order off a foreign-language menu and hoping you got chicken.   Then you just answer the questions and step through the process.

 So, be not afraid - if your application’s throughput is serviceable by a publisher, it’s well worth your consideration as a solution.  They’re getting faster, easier to use, and put a whole new range of possibilities at your fingertips.

Add comment February 9th, 2006