The DaVinci 6-6 is intended for the lower volume professional printing of CD and DVD media and is intended for music studios, video production companies, marketing companies, schools and colleges and home video and home audio enthusiasts.

• High Speed 6 colour CD / DVD Inkjet Printer
• Photo Quality Print Performance
• Easy use - no technical know how required
• Refillable Ink Tanks for cost effective per disc print
• High Throughput - Fast Response 6 CD tray
• Mac / P.C. software
• Ideal Partner product for Manual Duplication towers
• Durable professional design with metal parts
• Includes 12cm disc tray (6 discs)
• Optional 8cm and business card CD caddies

Hightlights:

• 120+ discs per hour output
• Cost per disc print is probably the lowest of any inkjet printer at under 5 Cents per disc
• Works with Windows and MAC
• Low entry cost

Review

So you want to inkjet print your CD's or DVD's?
You have lots of choices, starting at a sub $200 printer that can print one disc at a time.. and going though to a robotic printer that can cost over $25,000.
So what's best for you?
This question is bound to involve issues like print quality, number of prints per day, how much lead time do you have between the 'need' and required delivery.. etc. All in all far too complex to resolve here..
What we can do is to talk summarise the strengths and weaknesses of the DaVinic 6-6

Print Quality
In essence 6 colour inkjet prining can produce better quality print than 4 colour printers. This is becuase having the extra inks allows for more subtle colours to be presented. Additionally where a printer is designed for 6 colours it is intended for Photograhic work, rather than simply 'Office Allrounder' work.

Print Speed
Economy disc printers can take about 90 seconds to full face inkjet print a 12cm disc, plus the time to place the disc in the tray/caddy and remove it after the print. This comes out to be in the order of 45 dics per hour. Robotic printers can take as much time as their robotics are not faster than a person doing the same work... Most robotic printers take around 35 to 45 seconds to print a disc, so you are looking at between 40 to say 100 discs per hour. The big difference is however that the robotic printer does not have to be given breaks and can work though the night (unattended)
The DaVinici 6-6 has a disc caddy that takes 6 discs and in effect prints 6 discs in a go, so there is much less time consumed in loading and unloading of discs and so in effect it is printing a single A3 page instead of 6 small pages.. Much faster in the end!!


Cost of Ownership
The primary aspects to the overall costs comes down to 3 issues:
Initial purchase price and expected life
Cost of consumables (Ink) and ..
Labour required to get the work out.

Purchase price and expected life
For the DaVinic you are looking at a price (ex GST) in the range of $3,000 - $4,000. This is much more than entry level inkjet printers but a small number compared to the mid range robotic printer.

Cost of consumables (Ink)
Here is where the BIG differences occur. For example one popular desktop disc publisher is estimated to cost $0.25 per disc in ink!!
Where the printer has a colour cartridge that contains Cyan, Magenta and Yellow and say you are doing a very red disc, then you will run out of Magenta when most of the Cyan, and Yellow are still left... so there is a large amound of waste and cost.
Other printers may well have individual ink cartridges but these are are quite expensive and often no alternative (read cheaper) cartridges can be used.
The DaVinci has 6 individual ink cartriges and come with a continous inking system so you can buy bulk ink to refill the cartridges, on the fly. This means that not only do you have heaps on ink, but you will not have situations where you have to stop to change or refill ink cartridges. While prices are subject change, it is estimated that you will pay under 5 cents per disc for ink!!

Labour required to get the work out.
Of course all printers will require to to unpack unburned discs, and organise the printed ones, the amount of human intervention for the print process is potentially a big issue.
For the economy printer, each disc needs to be placed in a caddy and a button pressed to start the print, then at the end the disc has to be replaced with an unprinted one. This requires consant attention if you are going to get the maximum number of disc out...
At the other end the fully automated printer may take up to 200 discs and will work through them until completed, without any further human intervention (providing you don't run out of ink or have a disc feeder jam).
The DaVinci has a middle path where you have to manually load trays of 6 discs, about every 2.75 minutes. If you have a second caddy, you can have a prepared tray ready to go as soon as the current tray has completed printing...
At up to 120 discs per hour, I am not aware of any inkjet printer at any cost that can come close this this speed!!
When you think of an expensive, robotic system running at say 50 to 100 discs per hour, then it will take all day and night to do what the DaVinci will do in an 6 hour day. The initial purchase price maybe 3 to 10 times as much to buy and up to 10 times as much for ink!