Thermal Printing on a Silkscreened Disc

[LloydAZ]

We have a project at work that requires us to duplicate several hundred CD's. All of the CD's use the same full color graphics for the labels, so we just order 1,000 blank CD's silkscreened with the label and they look fantastic.

Now, we are getting in a second project for a different client that is similar to this. The CD's will all have the same background graphics on the label, but the client wants to add a line of text that will change every time we run the job.

I'm trying to figure out what would work best and keep the project as simple as possilbe. I suggested that we silkscreen the discs like we do with our other client, then purchase a thermal CD/DVD label printer to add the line of text to the CD after we burn it.

Has anyone ever tried doing something like this? Will the thermal ink stick to the silkscreened surface of the disc?

I have looked at the other following options:

CD Labels - Okay in a pinch, since these are just training materials that will probably only be looked at once or twice. Speed of printing is not an issue as they would be printed on a Xerox DocuColor 2045 which prints 45 pages per minute. Applying the labels would be a bit more time consuming.

Ink Jet Printer - Requires special discs, printers are expensive, speed of printing (we usually get short turn-around times on these projects and need to get them done as quickly as possible.)

Color Thermal Printer - Very Expensive.

LightScribe - Requires special media, no color output, extremely slow.

I would love to be able to talk my boss into getting a good production CD/DVD printer to produce high quality CD/DVD labeling, but I cannot convince him of this without having several clients lined up looking for this service.

Any suggestions about equipment or processes would be greatly appreciated!

[kschang]

Your best bet is one of those Casio CD printers. They cost about $100, available in Staples, and prints on almost any CD media's "top" side, but it ONLY prints in BLACK, no other color. You can silkscreen the rest, as you said.

[mridang_agarwal]

What is silkscreening?

[kschang]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silkscreening

Works on CD's too.

[BJ_M]

thermal printing on top of silk screening is not a good idea - the dyes dont adhere well ..

BUT if you leave a blank area with no silk screen - it wold work fine ...

the casio solution is not great as you can not register your print jobs (line up the disk - except by hand one at a time)