THE Evocept SPIN CD/DVD Title Printer prints text and graphics directly onto CDs and DVDs to make them look like store-brought ones.

The $199 device is great at home for labelling archives, back-ups and home movies.

Office workers will like it too ? no more handwritten disks being sent to clients.

The thermal printer prints one colour cartridge at a time. It comes with a black ribbon. Red, blue and green will be available by the end of the year.

It is a snap to set up. Users are presented with a template showing four areas of the disk that can be printed on: top, bottom and sides. Click on the area to make it active and type away. The top and bottom are 24mm by 60mm and the sides are 24mm by 40mm. The total print area is 48sqcm.

The included software will print in any font installed on computers running Windows 2000 or XP. Text can be set left, right or centre. It can be curved but must fit in these areas.

It will print BMP, TIF, JPG and PNG image files. Converting images to greyscale in an imaging package beforehand or using line drawings produces a better result than importing colour images directly.

The print head makes one pass over each quadrant leaving a waterproof 200dpi image. It rotates discs for perfect alignment ? hence the spin in its name. The job is done in a matter of seconds.

Ribbons last for 400 quarters. That can be 50 discs with printing in all four quarters, or 400 discs with printing in one quarter only.

Region4, the local distributor, says it is popular with small office/home office users and government departments.

See www.region4.com.au for sales outlets.

From AustralianIT