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REVIEWS
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Page 3 of 4
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One final note on this printer: Centering is an issue. Although the sole purpose of this printer is to produce CD/DVD labels, I found that its vertical positioning was off by anything from about one-tenth to one-half of a millimeter on my review unit, leaving a crescent-shaped sliver of unprinted coating along the inside and outside margins. The printer includes a utility to correct for centering problems, but, no matter what I did, I simply couldn't get the software to accept any changes I made to the centering settings, at least not on Mac OS X. You can compensate for this by offsetting your image slightly and overprinting the margins, but you'll have to wipe off the extra ink that gets on the uncoated portions of the CD or DVD. Not a huge deal, although it does waste a little ink with each print.
So, mechanically speaking, the Bravo Disc Publisher performs as advertised, though it will take a little acclimatization to the printer and your surface before you'll be able to get good results visually. Stick to the manufacturer's recommended media, and you shouldn't go too far wrong.[an error occurred while processing this directive]Software: drivers and mastering
Tying this whole miniature manufacturing plant together are the Primera drivers and a specialized version of CharisMac Engineering's Discribe called Discribe Robot. Now, I've always considered Discribe to be a clunker, but it'll get you where you need to go. And, in the case of the Bravo system, it's actually a necessity because it provides all of the robotic functionality for the DVD burner, though it is unnecessary for robotic operation of the printer if you want only to print labels and not to burn any media. (In fact, I printed out this article from my text application onto a bunch of CDs because I accidentally set the Bravo unit as my default printer in Print Center. Good thing the input bin wasn't loaded up with DVDs at the time!) And, of course, it's also unnecessary if you want to burn a disc directly from an application like Apple DVD Studio Pro and feed the disc in manually.
When you launch Discribe, you're presented with three options: Data CD, Audio CD and Disc Copy, all of which are also accessible through a pull-down menu, as are many other functions.
After you select your data or disc to be duplicated, clicking on the Robot Write button takes you to all of the available options for your burn, including the number of discs you'll write and the image to use as your label, if any. (Remember, labels can be printed separately later, if desired.)
You can also select print options from a standard print dialog. There are only two options for controlling color output at this time: intensity and PrimaColor Color Matching. This same dialog is also available from any application (including the ability to print multiple labels automatically) from any application.
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