Product Reviews

The growth in recordable CD drives means it's now easy to burn your own discs. But until now, about the only reliable way of labelling your CDs has been to write on them in marker pen. The Da Vinci CD printer from Copytrax is designed to change all this.

The device prints directly on to the surface of specially coated CDs, avoiding sticky labels, which can adversely affect the spin of the CD and in theory could peel off and become lodged in your CD drive.

On opening the box, we found the printer was a rebadged Epson Stylus Color 600. This was promising. Epson is known for making high-quality inkjet printers, and

ADVERTISEMENT

printable CDs are readily available at the same price as standard blank CDs from all major manufacturers. Copytrax has cut a hole in the back of the printer and bolted on an extra input tray which allows CDs to be fed through. A metal guide is provided to hold the CD in place, and the printer is fooled into thinking it's printing onto a thick piece of card.

The Da Vinci comes with a number of CD-shaped document templates, but most of these are for Windows users. Sadly, there are just two Mac-compatible templates - for use with QuarkXPress and Adobe FreeHand - which won't help home users running ClarisWorks.

Cutting printers apart and sticking on extra parts is far from a precise art. Consequently, the Da Vinci we tested was very slapdash at lining itself up with the CDs. After hours of manually adjusting the alignments in XPress, we couldn't line the template up so that it printed out correctly on the CD.

Another major drawback is the Da Vinci's price. At £899, it costs more than four times as much as the unmodified device from Epson. This, combined with the fact that the CD feeding mechanism obstructs the paper guides, make it a pretty undesirable product. Stick with your marker pen for now.