Sometimes it feels likes like gram for gram ink costs more than gold. Without consideration for the processes involved with printing discs you can soon find your cost of production is much higher then expected. Overall the greatest cost involved with in-house disc production is the cost of ink.
Whilst Primera disc publishers can be cheap to purchase and you get a great product for your money, the running costs can sometimes sting a little. The same goes for all the other disc printer manufacturers who rely on ongoing ink sales to sure up revenues and profits. Infact, often a disc printer is sold at a cost very close to the actual cost of manufacture.
So how do you get the most out of those precious ink cartridges?
A good guide to the estimated output of a 19ml cartridge, costing £35 might be as follows:
20% coverage mixed use of colour 600 prints
70% coverage mixed use of colour 140 prints (eg rainbows)
70% coverage single colour 40 prints (eg oranges)
So why are there these big differences? The reason is due to the Bravo ink cartridge system. Like 90% of professional printing solutions the Primera Bravo Disc Publisher range uses mixed colour carts. This means they contain resevoirs of individual colours, CMY. So if you take a new Bravo Ink Cartridge and do a job of full surface blue prints the cart will deplete after 40 discs. But if the image you were printing was Blue, Yellow and Red you may do 150 full face prints before the cartridge reads as empty.
So we can see from the above that the artwork will very much effect the amount of print you get from your ink cartridge. As a general rule, the less ink you apply to your disc, 01) The faster it will print 02) The more durable the print 03) The cheaper it will be to print.
Applying less ink to a disc in no way has to scarifice good design. Inkjet print processes are not best suited to having large areas of flat filled colour with high saturation. Flat filled areas will often dissapoint due to banding, graduation, pixelation and other inconsistancies, and will thus require more quality assurance time.
By carefull management of your cartridges you can increase the yield by around 300%, but we’ll talk more about that another time.
The advice we give at CD-writer.com is to wherever possible help to manage the customers expectations of their design and understand the limitation of the process. By controlling the amount of ink used in a design you can reduce the time to produce 1000 discs by many hours and reduce the costs by 100’s of pounds. By carefully managing your customers expectations you can soon return a large profit from your investment.
For more information about how to produce the highest quality discs, in the fastest possible time, with the largest possible profits, be sure to call the team at CD-writer.com on +44 208 293 0777 monday to friday 09.30 am to 17.30 pm.