Curse You, Non-Globalisation!

I have a DVD Burner, as I've mentioned before. I use it to burn DVDs. Burn, DVD, burn! At around 4½GB a pop, and one-third the price of disk space (even leaving out the added cost of RAID), they make a lot of sense. (In fact, they're just about the only backup medium that currently makes sense, at least if you're looking at the price of storage rather than at the value of your data. Which is the wrong way to look at it... Unless you happen to have a terabyte of files that you don't value that highly but would still be terribly annoyed if you lost any of them.)

Where was I? DVDs, burn, right! So I bought a hundred blank DVD-Rs, which are conveniently white on one side so that they can be printed on and you can tell which way up they go.*

So, I have a hundred DVDs, which I am working my way through rapidly. I'll probably be buying another hundred before I'm done.

I have a hundred, will have two hundred... Identical disks, white on one side, silver on the other. Oops.

Labels would be good. I could buy some CD labels, print them out, peel them off, stick them on, hope I don't screw it up. Or I could get a printer that prints right on the DVD! Epson sell two models that do this, the Photo Stylus 900 and 960. They look like nice little printers in general, and they're not too expensive (particularly the 900).

But. Not. In. Australia.

Which. Just. Happens. To. Be. Where. I. Live.

In America, yes. In Canada, too. In Britain, in Denmark, in the Philippines, in Singapore.

But not here, dammit. I've emailed Epson; it will be interesting to see how (and if) they respond.

* No, really. Cheap CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are sometimes featureless silver on both sides, and the only way you can tell which way up they go is by studying the diffraction patterns. Or by sticking the disk in the drive and seeing what happens, which is often more reliable.

Update: Epson responded this morning. Good for them.

Apparently the reason the 900 and 960 are not available in Australia is that they use dye-based inks (the email actually said "die", but never mind) rather than pigment-based inks. The pigment-based inks are water-fast (which means that they won't run), but the dye-based inks are not.

Epson helpfully pointed me to the Stylus Photo 2100, which is available in Australia (which I knew) and can print on CDs and DVDs (which I didn't know). It's a very nice printer, 2880x1440 dpi, 7 colours with individual ink cartridges, able to print on paper up to A3+ size with edge-to-edge coverage (no borders). It has parallel and USB and Firewire ports. (I like Firewire.)

It costs $1789.

Yowie.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:25 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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