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High-End Dry
Thermal printers from Rimage, CopyPro, TEAC, and others, typically cost $5,000-$10,000 and have always held sway in the enterprise market and with industrial applications, though inkjet advocates say waterproof media may be changing that in some segments of the industrial printing landscape. Thermal has also laid claim to a share of the desktop and small-office market because of its smudge-resistant reliability. But has the advent of waterproof media made these benefits irrelevant? "Thermal transfer printers lay down a plastic coating that adheres directly to the disc, and they will not smear," says Condre's Chuck Alcon. "The downside to that technology is that it is about three times more expensive to print that way because of the higher consumable costs and the higher initial price of the printer itself." These printers use a ribbon, installed inside the printer, and each image is printed onto the disc by heating the ribbon. "There are downsides in our view to that. First, this is much more expensive per disc. And replacing the consumables (the ribbons) is not a user-friendly process." In contrast, replacing an inkjet cartridge is child's play, according to Microboards' John Westrum. "Everyone has an inkjet printer on their desktop," he says. "Everybody knows how to change an inkjet cartridge. You pop out the old cartridge and pop in a new one." When one is debating the pros and cons of thermal printers, one must remember to differentiate between the thermal tranfer printers and the thermal retransfer (or reverse transfer) printers, Westrum cautions. "Thermal transfer printers are good for spot colors but not a 100 percent type of coverage. They provide no blending of colors. Their benefit is that cost per print is going to be very low, maybe 6 cents per disc. However, with the higher-cost Rimage Everest you can get blended colors and photo quality." The Everest uses the more complicated thermal re-transfer technology, he adds. Another downside to thermal transfer printers is that they have a far lower resolution (300-400dpi) compared to the inkjet standard of 4800dpi, according to Strobel. He says if you are trying to get 100 percent coverage of your disc, the cost per disc between inkjet printing and thermal transfer printing will be "about the same," but the thermal printers themselves are much more expensive than inkjet printers. "I can't see a reason, now that we have this new media, why you would go to a reverse thermal transfer printer. You wouldn't save money per disc, and you get slower first-disc-out speeds. In this marketplace, so many of the applications are publishing, not duplication, but one disc at a time, and in that situation that first-disc-out speed becomes important." If you are a disc printer end-user, the most important measure is cost per print, Westrum argues. But comparing the cost per print for thermal printers with the cost per print for inkjet prints is difficult because the technologies are so different. For example, an ink cartridge for Microboards' GX-1 inkjet printer costs $43.95, and you can get around 200 full-color, full-coverage prints off of that one cartridge, says Westrum. But if you're printing a "strong field of blue," you'll use up all the blue in the cartridge faster and might only get 160 prints. Consumption depends on color combination, saturation, and how much of the disc you want to cover. So inkjet printing costs are vastly variable. With a thermal transfer printer, which uses a ribbon, the cost per print is the same no matter whether you are just printing three lines of text or the whole disc in full color. So it's simple to gauge the cost per disc of a thermal printer, but measuring the cost per disc of an inkjet printer is not so simple. The main factor in cost per disc is amount of disc coverage, says Strobel. "Cost per disc depends on coverage. With inkjet if you do 100 percent coverage, it's going to cost you more than if you do 50 percent coverage. In contrast, with thermal transfer, it's always the same price per disc, because the same amount of ribbon is consumed no matter how much or how little you print, even if you're only printing on 5 percent of the disc, which is pretty typical. With thermal your cost is always fixed. It's about 40 or 45 cents for the consumables per disc, just for the ink, no matter how much or how little you print. However, with inkjet. if you're printing 50 percent of the disc, it's about 15-20 cents per disc. At 100 percent coverage it's about 30, 35, or 40 cents per disc. But you can control the amount of ink you put down and therefore control the cost per disc." The most expensive discs, of course, are the full-color discs with photographic images, which are most desirable to event videographers and others performing similar client services. Hardware Costs
Why are thermal printers so much more expensive than inkjet printers? "Thermal by its very nature is a more complicated technology in hardware," says Strobel. "You have an expensive thermal head, you have very high pressures, you've got rollers that have to be supported properly, and heads that go out if any kind of particle gets underneath them." Replacing a head could cost $300-400, he adds. "Thermal is a more delicate technology. Inkjet, on the other hand, is nearly bullet-proof at this point," Strobel argues. "Billions of dollars have been poured into its development." There are those, however, who see the more complex technology of thermal printers as a mark of distinction, like comparing a Model A Ford to a modern BMW. Sometimes, for some people, it's worthwhile to pay extra for the quality thermal delivers. The Prism, for example, a thermal tranfer printer from Rimage, is "more robust in terms mechanics and design," says Strobel. And even though it costs about $3,000, it has been very popular "in current applications where it's been established that cost is not so much an issue," he says. Thermal printers, especially the high-end retransfer models, also have a lot of extra capabilities that inkjet printers don't, says Westrum. "With a high-end thermal printer, not only is the image quality good, but there's also the ease and power of the enterprise networking software and server that comes along with it. So these printers can sit in a Fortune 500 company or sit in a mailroom and receive disc print orders from anywhere within the company. So you can really multipurpose it quite well. That really starts to increase ROI. They are quality pieces of equipment; they are made for a high-production type of environment. "The inkjet printer, on the other hand, is more of a desktop solution, where you can departmentalize the equipment," Westrum continues. "You don't necessarily need to network them. You could buy one for each department. For example, our new inkjet, the GX-1 (our entry level product), has a street price of about $1,800. At that price point you could buy five of those and put them in different departments and yet still have the same out-of-pocket expense (about $10,000) as if you'd purchased a high-end thermal retransfer system." In Defense of Thermal
Rimage sells inkjet-based printing solutions (the Desktop line rooted in its Cedar acquisition) and thermal transfer-based systems (the Producer and Prism lines), but its flagship product is the Everest thermal retransfer printer, which is sort of the Rolls-Royce of the industry. If any company in this space should feel threatened by the advent of waterproof inkjet media, it is Rimage. But Tom Peterson, product line manager for printers, media kits, and aftermarket at Rimage, seems unfazed by the new developments. "Our scientists and engineers actually worked at an early stage with Imation on the development of the AquaGuard coating. We were and we are very much a fan of those developments," says Peterson. "The new coatings by Imation and Taiyo Yuden are improvements over past technology. They work well with our inkjet printers, but the end user ends up paying more for a disc printed in this manner than with Everest," he says. "These two types of discs will cost around 80 cents each, and with 20 cents worth of ink, will end up costing the end user about one dollar. A printed Everest disc can be obtained for less than 80 cents." Peterson disputes the claims of "permanency" that some people are making about these new discs. "This is not generally regarded as a permanent or archival way of printing on a disc," he says. And, in fact, he claims, "The Imation disc is a vinyl label that is glued on top of the disc, and if you get your thumbnail under there you can peel it right off." In contrast, the Rimage Everest thermal re-transfer printer (priced at about $6,000) actually "fuses the ink into the top surface of the disc," says Peterson. "So for legal records, for example, where the chain of evidence requires that there is a literally a permanent bond between the data and the printing on top of the disc, the Everest in the only printer today that meets that requirement."
Thermal printers in general, and the Rimage Prism, in particular, are ideal for high-speed, high-volume applications, says Peterson. Though it isn't capable of full color, the Prism is even more economical than the Everest and blazingly fast, he says. According to Peterson, Rimage gives potential Prism customers the "5 for 5" pitch, meaning that the printer can print a disc in less than 5 seconds and for less than 5 cents.
"Inkjet printers are mostly popular in lower-volume applications," Peterson notes. "Anybody who is making discs by the hundreds or thousands, they are all using thermal or thermal re-transfer technology." Peterson says that among the drawbacks to inkjet printers are "the frequent cartridge changes that may be required in heavy use." He says that because his company's Everest thermal re-transfer printer, for example, uses a ribbon capable of printing 500 discs, it is a "great benefit for higher-volume production." When it comes to consumables, Peterson believes that the ink ribbons used in thermal printers have some advantages over the cartridges used in inkjet printers. "One of the key things with the Prism is that the ribbon will print 2,100 discs before it needs replacing," he says. And when it runs out, it runs out; there's no doubt or guesswork about when the ribbon needs to be replaced. In contrast, with an inkjet, "Some people get put off by the unpredictability of how long the cartridges will last," says Peterson. You "always have to keep an eye on the ink cartridge." Thermal ribbons eliminate this "nuisance factor," he says. Peterson also touts the quality of his thermal printers' mechanisms and speaks about the robustness of their duty cycles. He says people who buy thermal printers and use them daily can expect them to last 3-5 years. "The duty cycle that the thermal printer is designed for is much much heavier [than that of the inkjet]," he says. "When people tell us they have a volume of 500 discs per day, we steer them to Everest because it is a more robust system," says Peterson. "Generally. we will tell end users that a Prism or Everest printer will print in excess of 50,000 discs as a very easy part of its normal rated life. And I don't think any inkjet printer, even ours, would hold up to that kind of duty cycle." Peterson sums up his viewpoint on thermal printers by making a sales pitch for his $6,000 top-of-the-line model: "As long as you have sufficient volume to justify its purchase, the Everest printer will create full-color, high-resolution, permanent direct-to-disc prints in quantities of 500 without operator intervention. No other printer today can match its combination of reliability, long print runs, print permanence, and low cost per disc." What About Laminators?
One technology currently in use that's designed to make inkjet discs more waterproof and durable is Primera's Accent II Disc Laminator. With the laminator, you print out your discs on any of the popular inkjet printers in the market and then run them through the Laminator to seal the images from moisture. This was never the ideal solution, Primera's Strobel admits, as it adds extra equipment, expense, and time to the publishing process. "The only way we could get water resistance in the past was to have a separate $3,000 laminator that would laminate the inkjets discs after printing," he says. That extra lamination step is now unnecessary and the Accent Laminator is "nearly obsolete," Strobel says. "There are still some applications for our laminator," he says. "For example, if you want to use ultra cheap media at 20 cents per disc plus 10 cents per disc to laminate, you are still saving money," but the catch is you have to make the up-front $3,000 investment in the laminator. A Bright Win-Win Future
There's certainly an argument to be made that waterproof inkjet media will put thermal printers at a disadvantage in the marketplace. "But the other argument is that the quality you get with something like a Rimage Everest is better than silkscreen quality," says Microboards' John Westrum. "Instead of taking away from thermal printers like the Everest, I think waterproof media is probably going to grow the market" for inkjet printers, he says, not so much by colonizing the thermal market as by winning over skeptics in the traditional inkjet demographics who haven't bought any disc printer in the past because of their dissatisfaction with the state of inkjet technology. "We've had a number of people come to trade shows and do the old lick test where they lick their thumb and smear it on the disc and say: ‘Yep, well, I'm not going to buy it until it's waterproof,' and so they don't buy anything," Westrum says. "Now, with the availability of this new media, those people who were refusing to use this type of equipment, either because of price or durability, are now coming into this marketplace."
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