Use the Casio CW-100 CD printer with OS X

Feb 16, '05 09:33:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Just thought I'd share this as I haven't seen this posted anywhere else, and this looked like the best place to post to about it.

Casio makes these neat thermal wax printers that print directly on the CD. The current model is the CW-100, which can be had from J&R.com for $109 with a $30 rebate. Casio doesn't support this printer under Mac OS X, but TDK sells the exact same printer in Europe as the LPCW-100, and they have some OS X software available on their website for free download. It works perfectly with the Casio printer.

There are some limitations to the software: it is extremely limiting in the amount of text formatting you can do. It also doesn't handle DCBS fonts. But this can be overcome easily, as it allows for images to be dropped in the print areas in the layout software. What I did was use TextEdit to layout my text for the label, then print to PDF and use Graphic converter to crop and convert to JPG, and finally, dragged the JPG to the print area. But you can use whatever layout tool you want, be it Word, PowerPoint, Keynote, etc.

I tried using Preview to convert the PDF, but it kept reducing the resolution from 300 dpi to 72 dpi, so the text looked fuzzy when actually printed. Graphic converted kept the resolution at 300 dpi, which is the printer's resolution. One further benefit is that you get roughly twice the number of prints from a ribbon cartridge as you would under MS Windows. The printer is able to print to a rectangular area top and bottom of the CD in a 1" by 3" rectangle. The Windows printer drivers advance the ribbon the length of a print area between each print. So it wastes three inches of ribbon for each print area. The Mac OS X drivers don't do this; they only advance the ribbon between 1/8" and 1/4" between each print area. Casio specs a ribbon as able to print 40 areas, which is only 20 discs if you print top and bottom. In practice, I've gotten as many as 42 discs from a single ribbon. This is signifigant, because a three-pack of ribbons costs $19.88 from J&R, and that is the lowest price outside of eBay.

I've been using the printer at my church as we make CDs of the Sunday message for the members; we are printing between 60 and 80 disks each Sunday. So far, it works quite well. Print time is about 30 to 40 seconds for each disc. I do wonder how long the printer will last, as it is obviously not designed as a high volume printer. Since it is so cheap, replacing it when it burns out is no big deal -- we are spending way more on ribbons. There are more economical thermal disc printers to operate, but they cost about $2500 (but they do print on the entire surface of the disc). There really are no mid-range options for this type of printing.

I hope this tip helps at least a few people.

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