Printing Your Own CDRs With Ink

What Is The Difference Between The Epson Models 900 And 960? Continued

Thermal print ready CDRs cannot be used for ink jet printing due to the fact that the printing surface of the media is not appropriate to catch and hold the ink from an ink jet printer. The polished surface of most other CDRs will not work, either, as their surfaces are far from suitable for catching the ink and allowing it to dry. If you are going to use an ink jet printer to print to CDR or DVD +/- R/RW media, you must purchase media that offers a printing surface on the disc that is able to catch/saturate the ink and allow it to dry.

The Epson Stylus Photo 960

The 900 uses a single black ink cartridge coupled with a combined color cartridge; the 960 uses individual ink cartridges for each color. If you are going to use the printer exclusively for color printing, the 960's individual ink cartridge configuration makes far more sense, since you are more likely to use more of one color than another. This 960 gives you the advantage of being able to replace only the colors that you need to replace as they run dry.

Since in this article we are focused on the CD printing capabilities of these printers, we did not consider how well they print to traditional paper stock. That is a topic for another article. Epson has recently released the Stylus Photo R800, R300M and R300 models, which also offer printing on CDR/DVD +/- R/RW media. We noticed that the R300 is retailing at a low suggested retail price of $179 USD, which makes it less expensive than the Epson 900 model that we reviewed in this article.