Best inexpensive printable media for comercail sales?

[overloaded_ide]

I keep reading and reading, but I am getting NO where!

Ok, one person loves this, another hates it.

So my question I geuss is for those of you doing professional work, what disks do YOU use for quality disks to give your customers?

If your selling disks (weddings, funerals, Music Videos or whatever) you need high compatibilty, long life, perfect burns ect.. right. SO for that perfect disk your going to give your paying client, what are you using?
Also your probably printing them also I would think. Not just handing out a sharpie written disk, so what do you prefer for printables?
If your doing a volume of disks, I expect your not using $3 disks either.

And what burners you using?

So far myself I have only been using leda/princo 1x from Shop4tech.
I have not had a coaster yet due to a bad disk, but I try to only burn 4gig for a saftey margin. For my own personal use they are working fine, but do I really want to use them for comercail work in volume? I dought it.
Also they are not printable, gloss white tops.

Now I think my captures and DVDs are turning out pretty darned good finally. I have a business plan! It involves a business with their own VHS tapes. They sell them to the public, but they don't have any DVDs!
SO, I plan to get a contract to make them some!
100 disk minimum orders, and I expect repeat business from them fairly often. If all goes well, there are about 15 businesses I can hit in this one market area!

My goal is to produce the DVD package at about $2 my cost. Full case jacket, case, Printed disks.

If I get the contract, I will be building a disk duplicater I can add up to 7 burners into as I need them.
If I need to latter I'll build a second duplicater also.

I was thinking of using Ritek 4X printables, or 2x. As I need to buy more burners I am thinking dual format 4x ones.

What would be the sugestions for the best inexpensive printable media to use for this project. And for new burners?

I don't have alot of money to invest in this project, so buying 10-15 settop players for testing media compatiblity is not something I can afford at the moment. I don't want returns either though of course!!

Also I am STILL working on my magic video, another project I will need the same setup for.

Thanks

[The village idiot]

You want the best choice for this?

BJ_M will tell you that he uses inkjet printable Ritek G03 and G04 at work, and uses hundreds of them each year (or month?). SO I would say those are most likely what you want. You might also want to look at one of the all in one duplication/printing machines with the robot autoloading option. Pile the blanks at one end, pick up the printed and burned product at the other. This is not the kind of thing you want to use a single disk at a time printer for. Much less having to change disks every 15 minutes. Best to let the robots do the work for you.

Just my 2 cents.

[Ejoc]

You want the best choice for this?

BJ_M will tell you that he uses inkjet printable Ritek G03 and G04 at work, and uses hundreds of them each year (or month?).

~8000 ritik g03 , maybe 4-6 bad ones , may have have been me also (usually because im hooking up some firewire device while burning something on firewire)

This still blows me away

[The village idiot]

You want the best choice for this?

BJ_M will tell you that he uses inkjet printable Ritek G03 and G04 at work, and uses hundreds of them each year (or month?).

~8000 ritik g03 , maybe 4-6 bad ones , may have have been me also (usually because im hooking up some firewire device while burning something on firewire)

This still blows me away

That's 'cause it's his job and his hobby.

[BJ_M]

burned 60 dvd's today in fact ...

[overloaded_ide]

So then Ritek G03 and G04 printables are what I want?
Any best source for those for the best price? I saw Rima has them about $1.12 and $1.35 in 100 packs.
$5 shipping. Till I get some contracts, 100 at a time is more than enough to start, but then??

As for the robot burner/printer
Yea I was looking at one of those
But till I get some orders and payments I can't afford it
Any links for good inexpensive systems?
My max right now is about $1,000 to $1,500 tops that I could afford for equipment, and that is really pushing it hard!

So my currant plan to get started involves one offs x 100
Looking at one of those Lily 1-7 controllers and as many burners as I can afford at the time. Then build on that, or sell it and go robot.
I am also looking at the posibility of adding 4 burners to my systems instead of building the 1-7 duplicator. Promise IDE controller and I could go 4-6 burners in my systems, if they will work well together that way.

Printer not sure, probably the epsons 900 or 960.
First thing I got to do is get the sample disk perfect, then I am shooting for a small order of 100 of one tape to get started and test the market some.

I know that will be a real pain to run many orders that way, but I figure I could get out the first few 100 disks or more to get started up. Then use any profits to expand to more efficient equipment once I know I am in a stable market that will support it.

For now of course disks are my main concern, I certianly don't want to hand out a sample that won't work on their system! THAT would not be good for business

BJ_M,
If your doing this as work, what would it cost me to have 100 disks burned and printed if I farm out the job? Might be a better less expensive way to get started! If you do jobs like that you can PM prices if you want.

[The village idiot]

If you just need to get started, then here is some advice. Get several burners in firewire and get a firewire card for your machine. And instead of buyer an Epson 900 or 960, you should build and Epson printer mod. Much cheaper than the 900. Then you could use pigment inks too. Or you could simply build the Lexmark mod. Still way cheaper, but lots of work on your part. The duplicater would be nice, so as not to occupy your computer, but it adds extra money to the project. If you need to have a seperate burning system, you could buy a VIA ITX machine to connect to the burners by firewire.

Price the burners with firewire, and see how much different it is than the duplicater. Then go to http://www.idot.com and look at the price of an ITX system with either the Via EM6000 or M-9000 main board is. Both of those have firewire, and both would be fast enough for 2x burns, and most likely 4x burns over firewire. Then you just need some software that will burn to multiple burners at the same time. Never tried it myself, but some have. Just some more pricing options for you. Old 2x drives might save some money too.

[overloaded_ide]

Kinda what I was thinking, but I didn't think about firewire drives. I'll have to look into those too.

I have 4 systems in the house, 3 1700xps and a 2000xp, so I was thinking IDE internal burners and a promise IDE controler card.
2 on the Secondary IDE on the system board and 4 IDE on the promise card for 6 burners. Though my case only has 4 bays 5 1/4"
I have plenty of room to mod in 2 more bays.
I like large cases!

I'll look for one of those epson printers you listed in the mod guide and gonna give the lexmark a try too.

Main thing is to get some disks now. I'll probably order the ritek G04 printables latter this week. Hopefully they will burn 2x on my toshiba sd-r5002 for now. I'll use some for backups and the DVDs I'm making from captures, then when I get some type of printer I'll print them.

[The village idiot]

The big reason I suggest firewire is that you could run out of powersupply in your tower! With the firewire boxes, they include their own powersupply, so you never run out! And then you can upgrade things more easily. Since you have the other systems, you wouldn't need to build a dedicated burning machine from the ITX board.

It will be very teadious to change all those disks, but if you have the time....

Also with firewire, you could build slowly and keep growing until you can no longer buy the same type of drive. I would think that you would want to use all the same model drive for your multi burner system. Just to get rid of any speed conflicts.

The Epson is my choice for printing. But if you are going to do this in any thing above a few disks a day, you will want to get an automated system. There is simply not enough time to constantly change disks in the burners, and then in the printer. If you are going to start with a one disk at a time printer, you should build the vinyl caddy! Cardboard will not last too long for that kind of use! And if you are going to get an old Epson for printing the liners and stuff, let me know which model, I can help with continuous ink systems for the printers without the chipped carts! You can also order all the materials for the caddy and the ink system at the same time. Total cost should be around $30 plus shipping for the tubing and fittings. To make it elegant is a little more money, like $50 because of the bottles that I would recommend for the ink supply. The vinyl sheets are about $11 dollars for the 2 you would need. I think the Epson C42ux uses a non chipped ink cart, so you might be able to buy a new model that will work. Use Ink from http://www.mediastreet.com . Either pigment or dye in bulk supplies. The dye ink is very cheap, like about 4 (CMYK) four once bottles for the price of 1 Epson replacement cartridge! The pigment ink is only about twice that price, still really cheap. If you buy one of their Niagra continuous ink systems, you will break even by the time you use up the first of the 4 ounce bottles! (this as opposed to buying Epson replacements) If you want to run pigment inks, do not buy any other brand printer. The themal inkjets do not work with pigment inks! At least not these pigments. And the other piezo printhead printers are the expensive models from Canon. All of the Epson inkjets use piezo printheads.

[BJ_M]

BJ_M,
If your doing this as work, what would it cost me to have 100 disks burned and printed if I farm out the job? Might be a better less expensive way to get started! If you do jobs like that you can PM prices if you want.

i suggest you check around near your location .. there are many such places now that do duplication for low volume dvd ... It would not be economical for me to do it for others ... we are not a duplication facility .. but thanks ..

google search also turns up lots ..

[overloaded_ide]

Oh yea, I should mention I won't be working alone if I get this project going. I've got some free labour.
12yr old daughter could load disks for burning.
Wife can stuff case covers.
I'll do all of it anyway, but do the printing when we're all working at it together. NIce to have free help. That will help on the first couple orders.

Thanks BJ_M,
I'm sure there's not anything close to me, I live in a rural area. About 150 miles to the nearest Best Buy or Staples
Though I do know one other person that has a DVD burner only about 20 miles away
I will search google too, but thought if this is what you were doing, keep it amongst friends

The village idiot,
I hadn't thought of the power supplie. Most my systems do have 400watt ones or above though, I think. And I have two spares on the shelf.
I was also thinking about the building slowly I might like firewire drives if not too costly. One of the things I was thinking with IDE though is I could pull the slave hard drive, then put in 3 burners if I burn the files from the hard drive. Then I can get a IDE card for another 4 burners also.

Either way, IDE or Firewire it would be best to have the files on the hard drive for the burn, not a disk copy, right.

Your sugestions for a printer sound good too! I'll pm again on printers.

[SergeantD]

Overloaded, just curious what you charge your customers for wedding conversions? I live in Long Island NY and get a few jobs here and there just from word of mouth. I was thinking of putting some ads in the paper and stuff but was really wondering what I should charge?

Thanks

[overloaded_ide]

I'm not doing that type stuff. I may later though. I think mostley you need to look around your area and see if others are already doing it, what they charge, and what they do for that money.
Is it a straight capture & burn, or are they tossing in alot of fancy stuff too?

What I'm currantly setting up, or trying to, is to do DVD for some business that already have thier own VHS tapes. In this case I will be working with 100 or more DVDs per order, so that is alot different pricing than if I would be doing 2 or 3 disks of a wedding or school play for a family.

Doing family event type work, I think I would base my prices on length of the movie myself.
A 1hr movie takes less time to capture/encode/edit/author/burn than a 2hr movie would. So I would charge so much for the first master disk based on run time of the movie, then price copies extra per disk.

For what I am currantly setting up, I am doing the opposite though. I plan to make the master free as part of the first order, minimum 100 copies. I think they will feel they are getting a better deal this way, plus I will make more money in the long run.

[LK_garza34]

hey village idiot you seem to have alot of know how with daisy chaining of firewire drives. i have a ? if you dont mind, can i daisy chain a dv cam and ext burner and run some dvd software like ulead movie factory and have it go from dv to dvd direct (the software does it) my ? is will work daisy chaining it, i think so cause it traves on two seperat paths but i dont have any expirence with it just reading. any help would be appreciated