I've had occasion in the past to review Primera disc publishing equipment, and was pleased to have a chance to work with the company's newest unit, the BravoPro Xi2 DVD/CD disc publisher. As a media producer myself, there's something special about being able to see fruits of your labor produced on a disc with a beautiful, full-color label printed directly on the disc.
The BravoPro Xi2 is designed to burn CD and DVD media, and print a full-color label, all with a robotic mechanism to automate the process. The unit can handle up to 50 discs at a time in its default configuration, or 100 discs at a time if you use the included "Kiosk Mode" output bin extension.
The Xi2 unit includes two disc burners that can be operated simultaneously, greatly increasing per-disc turn-around time. For most DVD projects, the printer operates faster than the discs are burned, so having two burners to keep the printer busy makes fast work of most publishing jobs. A 50-disc data CD project finished in about two hours in my test run.
Setup was straight-forward, and not much different than setting up a basic inkjet printer. All packing materials were removed, input and output bins put into place, and the two inkjet cartridges (one black, one CMY) were installed.
Software installation also went smoothly. I used my Sony Vaio laptop running 64-bit Windows 7 to do the review. I half-expected to run into an issue with so new an OS--and 64-bit on top of that--but Primera fully supports 64-bit versions of Windows.
The software includes the device drivers as well as two software applications - PTPublisher, and SureThing disc label creation software. PTPublisher is what you use to create publishing jobs and it runs the hardware; SureThing is a designed purely for label design. SureThing does let you create decent labels, and it's the quickest and easiest way to do a label really fast. However, if you want to get really creative, you'll probably want to stick with your higher-end graphic design software. While I tested SureThing, I did do most of my labels in Adobe Illustrator to get the more advanced graphics design features such a program offers.
Primera included a significant amount of blank DVDs and CDs for the purpose of the review, and so, instead of wasting them, I looked for opportunities to support some friends in their ministry work with the testing part of the review. My first project was for a Campus Crusade for Christ missionary who has an MP3 CD he uses for evangelical purposes. We ran off about 110 copies of his CD project, using a straight JPEG image as the label. I used 50 of the discs that Primera sent, as well as two 30-packs of Memorex discs my friend provided. The Primera discs duplicated perfectly; with the Memorex discs I ended up with four coasters (bad disc burns), and one problem that resulted from user error.
Many disc manufacturers put a clear plastic pseudo-disc on the top of the stack when they package their product, which I know to look for and discard. Memorex, however, also puts a black pseudo-disc on the bottom of their stack, which I've never run into before, and unknowingly loaded into the middle of the input bin. The robot arm picked up this black disc. Since it's a different thickness and also may have a slightly different hole diameter than a real disc, the disc fell off the robot arm while it was moving to load it into the burner, dropped on its side between the burner and the input bin, and promptly created an obstacle to the robot arm. When the arm tried to traverse back to the input bin, it smashed against the disc, knocking the input bin askew (now I know why the input bins aren't securely fastened to the publisher!), made a horrendous noise, and stopped.
Much to Primera's credit, once I cleared out the problem disc and set things right, the publisher functioned perfectly normal with no damage. And this user made a mental note to look more carefully at what I'm loading into the input bin.
My next test was a two-disc DVD project for a local church, including a previously produced full-color JPEG for the label. This time around, things didn't go as smoothly. The disc burned just fine, but the label did not print correctly. While the preview area of the software showed the label (as expected) covering the entire disc surface, the Publisher actually shrank it down, printed it in the upper-left corner of the disc, and covered the rest of the disc surface in black ink. After wasting a few discs, I brought up the SureThing label software, placed my JPEG image as the disc background image in SureThing, and used the SureThing version of the label in the project. This worked fine, and I obtained the results I was looking for, although with a few extra steps.
I reported this problem via the support section of the website, and within 40 minutes had a response indicating that it was indeed a bug in the publisher software, and would be put on the list to get fixed. At last report, Primera says a fix will be included in the next software release.
I then went on to burn the second disc in this two-disc project. And, ran into another problem. This disc was a typical DVD disc with AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS folders, but also included another folder containing .PDF handouts to accompany the video teaching sessions. Because of this extra folder, I couldn't pick the normal Video project option, as there's no way to tell the publisher to pick up the extra folder. So, I picked a DVD Data project, and added the three folders to the burn list.
The publisher started the burn, and then promptly ejected the disc into the discard slot, and reported Software Error 101. I followed the suggested solution to this problem, and kept getting the same result, even after ensuring I was running the latest drivers and software versions.
I reported this error to Primera Technical Support, and also received a prompt response. The first response is that it wasn't a valid video disc project because of the extra folder. First of all, I didn't request a video disc project - I requested a data project. And secondly, this isn't true - it's not unusual to have a DVD video disc with extra folders, and in fact, the Sony DVD Architect software I use for creating DVD projects has a function to specifically add extra files to the DVD disc.
I called Tech Support up, and worked through the problem on the phone. The support tech acknowledged that it should work, and that in fact, earlier versions of the software handled this correctly (but are not compatible with this model), but the latest versions do not. The solution we finally found is that if I created an ISO disc image of the disc, and used that as the source to burn the discs, it worked fine. So, it wasn't a show-stopper, but again, extra steps were involved to get the needed result. Primera is working on this problem.
And finally, while the model I was sent had DVD burners and not Blu-ray burners (a Blu-ray version is available), I was able to print Blu-ray disc surfaces using this unit, which is a nice plus.
In closing, the labels the BravoPro Xi2 produces are indeed stunning, and people are truly awed by their appearance. The problems I ran into were not show-stoppers, and work-arounds were found. But for a company that specializes in disc burning and printing, and for an MSRP of $3,295, I have much higher expectations. When it's working right, it works great, so I would recommend it with the caveat of being prepared to deal with issues.
