Disc manufacturing - where do I go?

[muuzomaker]

Hi,

I'll apologise in advance if this a question people ask a lot, I am new to the forum. Please point me in the right direction if this is the case.

I've got my 'album' finished and I want to have it made up in to CD. I don't want anything fancy, just the usual small CD booklet and back cover, maybe wrapped in plastic.

There are so many websites around offering different disc services, so I just wondered if anyone had any good or bad experiences with any particular ones. I might only want 50 discs to start with, and maybe 500 in the future if I got lucky, but I'm not sure where to start.

Any input would be much appreciated I'll do the CD design myself to avoid any other costs like that.

[James Perrett]

This has been covered before (although not for a while) but the big question has to be whether you choose duplicated or replicated (glass mastered) discs?

Duplicated discs are CD-R's which are burned on a normal CD writer. Replicated discs are the kind of discs that you normally buy in a shop.

Duplicated discs are cheaper for a small run but tend to look slightly less professional than replicated discs. Some of them have a slightly gold tinge to the playing surface while others will look green/blue. The label surface will usually be inkjet printed although thermal CD-R printers are available which produce better looking monochrome labels. There are also a few older CD players that won't play them although these are becoming rarer.

Replicated discs incur a large setup charge but, once you've paid that, each disc is cheap so 1000 discs cost little more than 500 discs. They look better too but you could easily end up with a few hundred just sitting in the attic if you aren't good at selling them.

Cheers

James.

[Martin Walker]

Very good answer form James there

In my experience the lowest quantity for Replicated disks is around 500.

If you're going to do the CD artwork yourself, try to download a template from the company you choose for the software you're using, as you'll need to get lots of little things right such as overlaps and colour bleed areas.

Martin

[Dave Blackman]

The label surface will usually be inkjet printed although thermal CD-R printers are available which produce better looking monochrome labels.

Just a quick correction - we've got a thermal colour printer here with a resolution of 600dpi and the reults are stunning, so you can have colour duplicated discs if you want.

Dave

[James Perrett]

Thanks Dave - I haven't been keeping up with duplication technology as much as I could be these days.

Cheers

James.