Is anyone here involved in CD/DVD replication/duplication and printing?

[Repro Man]

Or is it all paper based? Or do you print onto other things?

Just wondering as I'm pretty much printing onto anything that stays still long enough, with discs and packaging being the core business. We've only really just started taking on a lot more paper printing jobs in the last few months.

Printing and manufacturing discs and packaging comes with it's own set of tricks to try and catch us out! Would be interesting to discuss with you lot if you're in the same boat...?

[doubting_thomas]

If I remember correctly, Jalan worked on CD replication. If only someone could get
him to come back to the forum...  I have means to contact him for you Reproman.
Shoot me a PM if you'd like me to do that for you.

[Repro Man]

To be honest, it was just a general query to see if anyone already here did discs and start a discussion. I have no urgent requirements or problems to sort out. No need to drag anyone in from outside! It just occurred to me that most people on here only ever mention printing paper stuff...

So whereas most of you would have experienced the difficulties of colour-matching across paper parts you may not have experienced the virtual impossibility of matching a printed disc to a recycled card wallet, for example!

But thanks anyway, Thomas.

Still no one already on here printing discs? How about USB devices? Or plastic cards?

[tapdn]

The last shop I worked in supplied silk screens to a company for printing labels on oil filters and fuel filters. Very critical tolerances  trying to keep very small type "open" - 300 count fabric and special emulsion coating. I remember one of the warnings on back of a fuel filter was "Not to be taken internally" FFS
Fellow who works here now use to have a recording studio and he showed me the cd replicating machine that printed the lables, but I never ask what software and quality control drove the process. Will when I see him again.
I always wondered how they print on golf balls with all those dimples.

[jezza]

Used to do disk labels a few years ago printing onto the CD, but only the artwork side of it and not the final out put or printing

Want to know anything particular?

[Lammy]

I used to work with a guy that did tons of CD's, jackets and the lot. Mostly silk screen of offset. Yup, offset printed CDs. Couldn't believe it myself. He sent out for those things but had his own inkjet duplication system for shorter runs, ie. <100 Was neat stuff for sure. Last I knew, he was trying to find a short run shop that could do his jackets digital and consistently. If I had my druthers I'd have gotten whatever machine the guy wanted since we could have done all the die cutting in house. The hook was he wanted 24 hours turn for orders. That would have meant printing, die cutting, folding and gluing. He had a good volume, but not enough to put on 3 shifts to meet that demand.

[Ear]

You mean legal CD reproduction?  :evil: kidding

Similar to Tap, the last place I worked at, we would do film for CD labels and the jackets, etc... It was always fairly coarse screen, I think the process was similar to silk screen. We printed some jackets/tray cards but never the CD label it's self. We would run film, do a matchprint and send it off the the place that made the CDs. Got to see some cool art and got exposed to a lot of bands I had never heard of since it was a smaller, independent label.

[Joe]

Some of my former co-workers went to work for a place here in Southern Illinois that did nothing but CD/DVD. They closed the one here a little over a year ago and moved all the work to their other plant in Mexico. For me though it's all paper except we do some business cards on the magnetic stock but I'm not personally involved with any of that.

[Monkeyman]

Large quantity CD/DVD printing can be done on both offset and silk screening. The screen printing we usually did was at an 85 LPI, so it was fairly coarse. Whereas the offset is done at 175lpi with much nicer results. The ink goes directly onto the CD, no paper whatsoever. When doing the offset, most times it's using 5 colors, white flood then CMYK on top.
Worked fine with our standard .25pt trap. Sometimes we'd have issues with screen angle conflicts, pretty similar to standard offset paper printing. Playing with dot gain had to be the worst, it's a little harder to read off a disc than it is paper. I much preferred working with the screen printing stuff as it was usually 1-3 color and easy to make sure they printed right.