Primera is well known for its line of disc publishers— robotic devices that will burn CDs, DVDs and, if properly equipped, Blu-Ray discs. Its integrated inkjet printing technologies are used to print beautiful artwork onto the disc surface. Recently Primera introduced the Bravo 4100 line of publishers, and I had the opportunity to try out the 4102 publisher, equipped with two DVD burners. The publisher can operate in two modes. In its normal mode, the right disc bin holds blank media (a 50-disc capacity), and the left disc bin receives the completed discs. Any failed discs get ejected from the slot directly in front of the DVD burners.
The second mode of operation is called “Kiosk” mode. You add the provided 100-disccapacity tray to the front of the publisher where the rejected discs would normally get discarded in standard mode, and the two internal bins are both used for blank media. In this mode of operation, the publisher can duplicate up to 100 discs in one session.
For software, it comes with Primera’s PTPublisher system that actually runs the robotics and controls the project queue. For creating disc labels, SureThing disc label software is included. For quick label creation, the SureThing program is fine to use. If you want a really snazzy label, you’re going to want to use your graphic design program of choice, like Photoshop or Illustrator. I did all of my labels in Illustrator, and exported a JPEG image for use with the publisher.
To run a project, you fire up the PTPublisher program, load up the blank media, and step through a few windows providing the files to be burned and the label to be used. There are several types of jobs you can choose, from copying an existing disc, to making audio and video discs, to burning data discs. You can also duplicate an ISO image of a disc.
In Action
On the printing side of things, Primera has moved the Bravo line to separate cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges instead of one tri-color cartridge. I love this change—now if you have a project that’s heavy on one color ink, you aren’t wasting ink by having to change all three colors at once. Love that.
I used the publisher with my two-year-old Sony Vaio laptop. Unpacking and installation went fine—you just insert the installation CD and it walks you through the steps to unpack, connect and setup the publisher hardware and software. In order for my computer to see the drives after installation, I needed to reboot. Once rebooted, everything was up and running. It’s not uncommon for software installations to need a reboot afterwards, so this was easy to figure out. Primera reports that if you cancel the installation early, you won’t get a message to reboot your computer.
My first run of discs was a three-song audio demo CD project I did for a friend. It has a full-color label, heavy on greens and blues. I loaded up 50 discs and let it rip. It tore through 50 discs in very short order—printing is incredibly fast, and the robotics do not waste much time either. During the process, I did get an error from Windows 7 stating that “PTPublisher has stopped working,” but the job continued until it was completed. The software failure left one CD-R in one of the two drives in an incompletely burned state, and the job could only use the other drive for burning at that point-but the job did complete, and that's the only time I saw that error occur. The discs looked excellent.
Worth Noting
This project used up the entire Cyan ink cartridge-after about 75 copies the ink cartridge started running dry, so the labels on the rest of the discs were of lower quality. A nice feature to add would be for the publisher to detect that it's out of a color, and pause the job to allow you to swap out that cartridge. I did get a message at the end of the job stating that the Cyan cartridge was low.
With the amount of ink from the other cartridges that was used, as well, I'd estimate the cost per disc for printing full-coverage labels at about 37 cents. Your mileage will vary based on your specific label.
My next test was to check to see if the two problems I found with an earlier Primera publisher I tested had been addressed in the new model. Prior publisher software had a problem with CMYK color-mode labels. I created a CMYK JPEG and did a quick print-only project to see how it printed. I was very pleased to see that with the new version it printed perfectly.
The second test didn't fare so well. If you have a DVD project that contains Video_TS and Audio_TS folders, and also have other folders on the disc as well, the publisher will start burning the first disc, stop after just a few moments, spit the disc out of the reject slot, and put up a window that says "Disc Error 101." Apparently the burn engine feels that if you have the two folders for a DVD movie disc, you shouldn't have anything else on the disc (which is incorrect), and fails. Given this is a duplicator, it should not be making judgment calls on what you want to burn onto your discs. It should just do it. Primera says this issue will be addressed in the next software release.
There is a work-around for this problem, however. You can create an ISO image of the DVD disc you want to duplicate, and then use the ISO project option to create the duplicates. When working from an ISO image, the burn engine doesn't seem to care what's on the discs.
My last test was to do a 250-disc duplication project for Rancho 3M Christian Orphanage in Mexico. Each year we produce a thank-you video to send to their supporters, and the publisher showed up in time for me to use it for this project, and spare the orphanage the cost of commercial duplication and printing. The publisher chewed through this project with ease. With a simple black text label, with only a small fraction of the disc surface receiving ink, the black ink cartridge had no problem producing all the discs needed. Estimated cost per disc for this project is one cent.
I did run into a problem at the end of this job, however. With about 15 discs left to go, the publisher decided that it was really out of cyan ink, and at that point, refused to proceed with any job until a new cyan cartridge was inserted-which I didn't have at the time. It didn't matter that I had checked off the "only use black ink" option, and even trying to at least finish the duplication aspect with a no-label job, the unit would not proceed without a new cyan cartridge. Primera reports that this is a bug, and will address it in a future software release.
So, the bottom-line from me? The Bravo 4102 (MSRP $3,295) produces beautiful discs at a fast pace. It has some minor flaws and quirks, but the robotics are solid and the system did well overall.
