Product Reviews

What do you get if you cross a printer with a CD writer? The honest answer is, a bit of a mess. We were desperate to like the Primera Bravo Disc Publisher. It's the first such device from the company that's Mac-compatible, and it sounds very tempting.

Load up to 25 blank, printable CDs in the hopper on the right, and the Bravo will pick them up one by one, depositing them in the burner, moving them to the printer, then dropping them into the output hopper. Job done, we thought.

Alarm bells started to ring, however, when we connected the Bravo to our test Mac. It requires both a FireWire and a USB connection, evidence that Primera really has just mated two separate pieces of kit. After some initial confusion (which was resolved by careful inspection of the manual), we did manage to get it running.

We originally thought our aversion to the supplied software bundle was based more on our unfamiliarity with it than on any inherent flaws, but having used it for some time, it's fair to say it's at best clunky. Eschewing the standard Toast software, the Bravo comes with Discribe from CharisMac. We can't fault Discribe for its range of supported formats. However, its unpolished interface hides even some fundamental controls, and in order to duplicate a CD, you have to open the software and your Mac's CD tray in a very specific order.

Worse, its integration with the supplied label designing software, the venerable Discus, is as botched as the two parts of the hardware itself. Checking the Print Image on Discs option in the Burn window activates Design Image and Choose Image buttons. Clicking the former does launch Discus, but it can't even pass the completed image back to Discribe; a dialog reminds you to export the design from Discus and then select it using the Choose Image button. We'd expect this sort of behaviour from beta software.

Label manners

Discus itself looks awful. Its developers have assured us that users like it, and it does offer a quick way to create a CD label, but it's such a dismal piece of software and supplies such atrocious templates that we find this hard to believe. Its design tools

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work so differently from those found on any other package that they're very confusing, and its type tools produced oddly kerned and amateur results. Happily, you can just import any 120mm square artwork, bypassing Discus totally.

Despite the fast drive (54x24x52x) and competent printer, running the Bravo isn't a speedy process. The robotic arm frequently hesitates in the middle of an action, and while the Bravo makes some attempts at burning one disc at the same time as printing another, it never quite seems to pull it off. In our test, it took a little over half an hour to burn and print four discs, although this is certainly faster than attempting to duplicate and print CDs by hand.

The finished discs are impressive. CDs with a white printable surface are fairly commonplace now, but the supplied blanks, which have a semi-transparent coating, give a very professional finish. At 600dpi, some banding is evident and, in common with many low-end printers (in this case from Lexmark), the image is noticeably over-saturated. However, the default 1200dpi and top-quality 2400dpi settings both produce admirable results. The Bravo includes a standard print driver, which means you can print from any application. Pleasingly, the software also knocks out the areas that wouldn't fit onto the CD's surface.

Primera hasn't made enough of an effort to integrate the burner and printer, either in hardware or through software. We would overlook these shortcomings in a device costing anything from £250 to £500, but it's the Bravo's huge £1295 price tag that really jars.

Unless you positively can't live without the automation, it just doesn't add up. The likelihood is you have a CD burner in your Mac already. If not, less than £100 will buy you an external one. An additional outlay of around £160 will buy you a printer that will print directly onto CDs but won't be limited to them. Use the remaining cash to buy stacks of blank CDs; a little shopping around online buys you almost 5000 brand name, printable discs for the remaining £1035.

Cost concerns

A quick ring round some high-street duplication services reveals you could have between 1000 and 2000 burned, full-colour discs produced for the price of the Bravo, and big commercial duplicators supply nearly 10 times that for the price. Although, short-run copies will cost more per disc.

There's a DVD version of the Bravo available for £1645, but at that price it's even less attractive than the CD version reviewed here.

Designers producing promotional portfolios, shareware developers, bands and others would doubtlessly find the Primera Bravo Disc Publisher useful. However, its lack of polish and ridiculous price make it impossible to recommend.