New printer! Epson R320 advice

[rallynavvie]

Picked up an Epson R320 this week. I had this spindle of Ritek printable DVDs so I had to get something to print on them. I could have probably picked up the R200 or R300 since it will only be printing discs (I've got a Xerox 7700 for everything else) but I got a good deal on the R320 so I guess it can double as a memory card reader too. I like the 6-color ink system, similar to what I've got on the HP DesignJet 5000 at work, for its slightly larger gamut.

I already test-printed on the sample CD and I have some questions for those of you who have been using these printers longer than I have. Is there any other way than using the Epson CD software to print onto discs? I would like to be able to set everything up in other design applications like InDesign or Illustrator instead of having to create a raster image and placing it in the Epson software.

The test print I did consisted of text (negative and positive), a gradient background, and two contrasting photos. The gradient and photos were done in Photoshop, then it was dropped into an InDesign template to do the text (because text sucks in Photoshop). I then exported the InDesign file to PDF and had to then rasterize it in Photoshop @300dpi in order to drop it in the Epson software. The gradients came out great, the text was about as good as I'd expect from an inkjet, but the images went a little crazy, they posterized a wee bit even though they were converted to CMYK color space to make sure that the Epson software didn't tweak trying to convert from RGB.

I've got the ICC profiles for the printer but those are only really useful when printing through Photoshop or InDesign which I don't know if you can do for DVDs.

[stiltman]

I do everything in photoshop or illistrator, save it as a tif, then open it in Epson Print CD. Sometimes I have to stretch it a mm or so to get everything exact. Search the media forum if you need templates