How to Adjust Printer Settings for Disc Printing
A lot of people do not know how to adjust the printer driver in order to adjust the print settings which dictates the quality of a printed disc. Depending on the disc type used, taking into consideration the surface type, printable area, shape and any unprintable areas e.g stacking rings, the printer driver is generally the first place to look unless you have a dedicated 3rd party software. In the main, this article is being posted in a 'general view' rather than specific to any one printer and differences may occur. In addition, we will concentrate on three types of printable disc, being the 12cm Standard CD, 12cm Full Surface CD-R and the Vinyl Style CD-R with a 70mm printable area, separated by stacking rings.
Standard 12cm CD-R ~ Printable
Older discs, or cheaper ones may not be full surface and the actual hub may be a silver or transparent area which is non-printable. These can be printable from approx 35mm - 45mm through to the maximum of 116mm / 117mm but again, check your disc specification or measure with a ruler. You should never print onto the non-printable area, as it will result in saturated ink on the disc which can bleed into the design.
12cm CD-R ~ Full Surface Printable / Hub Printable
All discs are 120mm round with a 15mm hole in the middle, and in the majority of cases they are known as 'full surface printable' which means you can print from approximately 21mm up to 117mm without interruption. These full surface discs are often called 'hub printable' allowing print from near the central hole, to almost the edge of the disc. It is not generally possible to print beyond 118.5mm or less than 19mm but before adjusting print driver settings, measure your disc with a ruler or read through any paperwork provided with the disc.
Custom Vinyl Style CD ~ Printable
These special discs are pre-printed with a vinyl effect groove which runs from 70mm through to the edge of the disc at 120mm. The inner area is inkjet printable and can be printed in two zones from 24 - 31mm and 36mm - 70mm. In this case, it's is vital that your printer be configured to stop printing in the non-printing zone, so as to avoid ink saturation and bleed into the design.
Locating the Printer Driver (Windows)
Locating your printer will depend on the version of windows you are running, but opening the start bar may well show you 'Devices & Printers' which you can click to access a list of printers installed on your system. If you do not see this, please click on 'Control Panel' and then look for 'View Devices & Printers' or 'Printers & Scanners'.
Once you have located the printer, right click on the model shown and left click on 'Printer Preferences' which will open the printer driver as shown below. Note: The example below is from a windows 7 system and may vary according to the windows version you are running.
Printer Driver Settings Example
Adjusting Paper Stock
This varies according to the printer you are running, but as standard most will be set to a 'plain paper' which will generate a low resolution print output. If you adjust this to be premium matte, or photo glossy for example, it will adjust the printing resolution and make your output print much more vibrant. You will have to test this on your disc to ensure it is suitable for the disc surface, as too much ink can cause just as many issues as not enough. Playing with the settings here will enable you to fine tune the printing on your media, but it will take a few trial runs to get right and remember, no one setting will suit all discs. If you are sticking with one type of disc, you may not need to adjust the settings again, but often different discs are used or certain artwork may not work with the setting your have as default.
Adjusting Print Resolution
Some printers may be set to 'Draft' or basic mode which is a low resolution printing output and suitable for every day text printing on cheap paper, but not suitable for disc printing. Play with the settings and consider using best, photo or premium depending on the options you are provided. Again, play with this setting until your are satisfied with the output quality.
Paper Size
This is not a straight forward one to answer and will vary considerably for each printer. In a lot of cases, our customers will be using paper printers which are capable of printing discs, rather than dedicated disc printers. In a lot of cases, dual capable printers will assume an A4 paper is being printed, but software provided with the printer will print specific co-ordinates to allow disc printing. In these cases, it is not advisable to adjust the paper stock unless it says 'CD,DVD' for example, as this will obviously mean it is set up for disc printing. Adjustment for alignment purposes will either be done in a template provided or 3rd party software application, rather than within the driver itself. For the purpose of this 'general blog' we will be looking only at accessing general printer settings to enable direct adjustments to the printer settings.
Printable Zones
This is the one which will cause most issues and again, it is impossible for us to give a single answer which will suit everyone. In some cases, the printer driver will allow you to specify 'hub printable settings' but this is often found on dedicated disc printers only. The example image below shows how this ADR Opti Printer Pro (hybrid HP printer) allows the user to adjust the dimensions of zones which are printable.
Mask Settings within Printer Driver
In the example image above, the driver settings provides an option for 'Mask Settings' which forces the printer to apply artwork to the area defined in this area. If you look at the image above, it specifies an outer and inner limit for the main disc, but also has a seperate option for 'Hub Area Settings' and it is this, which allows two seperate zones to be printed. As shown in the example image, it is possible to tell the printer that it must ONLY print from 70mm down to 36mm and then stop until 31mm through to 24mm as detailed in the 'Hub Area Settings'. This means, it is possible to print the vinyl disc without getting messy ink everywhere.
Printers which do not have Mask Settings in the Driver
In many cases, non-dedicated disc printers may not have the settings as shown above. In this case, it may well be that the printable areas are defined in a 3rd party design software provided with the printer. For example, Discus is a software application provided by many manufacturers and this allows you to influence the printable areas through it's templates. In this case, please check the settings within the 3rd party application to see if you can define printable areas of your disc.
Alternative Methods
Most printers do not print white and a workaround for discs is to mockup your artwork showing non printable areas in white. For several of our own printers here at www.webs4cd.co.uk we mockup artwork in Illustrator and have our template set up with guides that define printable and non printable areas. When we position our artwork to print, our template chops out the non printable center hole, stacking ring and any other elements, showing it as either transparent or white. When we send the job to the printer, anything white is ignored as the printer does not have a white to print, therefore does not apply any ink to the non-printable areas. You can use Illustrator, Photoshop, Corel Draw or similar art package to achieve this.
We hope this proves useful to some of you
