OT: DVD printer needed after R200 no longer prints

Julius_ wrote on 12/21/2007, 7:29 AM

Hi,

After a few years, I think my Epson Stylus R200 printer has it's days numbered. Last night I was unable to get a good print of a picture. All is fine on the screen, but after printing, the people look like cartoons (too much ink??). I messed around for hours trying different settings, cleaning, paper, alignment, etc, etc..No available.

So what are people in here using for DVD printing? My budget is around $150?

Thank you

Back to post

Comments

riredale wrote on 12/23/2007, 12:06 AM

We've used printers from HP, Canon, and Epson. I greatly disliked HP's tendency to install lots of stuff along with the driver; all the Epson printers eventually clogged their printheads. The Canons just keep on running. As several of us have mentioned before, you can buy a generic Canon printer on eBay for maybe $100 and then get a CD tray and roller assembly for about $15 to convert your US printer into an international printer (which can print CDs). It's a simple process and the mechanical aspects work very well. To get full color saturation on Taiyo Yuden Watershield disks I need to run the disks through twice.

For disk layout I use a remarkably powerful program called "Nero Cover Designer," which comes with the Nero burning software package.

JJKizak wrote on 12/23/2007, 6:31 AM

Geez, I just keep my old Epson 960 with the two hand manual loading tray and Epson ECC3 software. Not for huge amounts of discs but I maybe have run through about 1500 discs.
JJK

Laurence wrote on 12/23/2007, 8:15 AM

Epson has this program they call "loyalty" where if you call them up and ask about repairing an old Epson, they will give you the option of getting a discount on a new one. I got a new Epson RX-680 for a little over a hundred dollars this way. It was only a 40 dollars or so more than a new set of ink cartridges. It is really nice and prints on discs really well. it also works via bluetooth and scans directly to PDF on a thumbdrive. Pretty cool!

Coursedesign wrote on 12/23/2007, 8:15 AM

The Epson R200 printer belongs in the consumables section. I wore out two before getting an R320, that also has the beefy tray.

The 320 has started making trouble too now, complaining before every disk that the tray is not correctly inserted. A quick hit on the Paper Feed button on the printer followed by Continue on the screen gets it going, but this is not OK.

I'm also approaching a volume where I can't defend the above setup much longer, so I'm beginning to look for auto duplicator/printers. It seems to me that the units selling for $1,500-$2,000 today have a materials cost of maybe $250 (to be very generous), and it is just against my religion to overpay that much, especially considering that most of these are sold direct with minimum overhead.

It seems to me that the first of those companies to take a deep breath and drop the price below $1,000 could make a lot of money in a very short time.

(And replication is not the answer for me, as I don't want to go 1,000 copies between revisions. There is a 300x packaged solution that I may consider if I get desperate enough.)

Laurence wrote on 12/23/2007, 11:10 AM

A couple of times a year I find myself doing replication jobs which are just a total PITA with an Epson tray printer. I would just LOVE to get an automated printer that could do a bunch of discs at a time as well. The price still seems a little steep though.

Dan Sherman wrote on 12/23/2007, 2:16 PM

Repalced Epson R200 with R280.
Works well.
R200 still prints but one has to hand feed the DVDs.
The DVD tray no longer works,---the end the rollers grab is worn too thin I bekieve.
Been a real work horse though.
Still most jobs over 50 or so I farm out as it isn't worth my time to do more than that.