What You Should Know About Quality CD Duplication Basically, mass produced “Replicated” CDs are all created equal. There may be a slight varying quality, but most untrained eyes or ears would never be able to tell a difference. All replicated CDs are produced by high-end injection molding machines and print is printed on big offset presses. Duplicated CDs, however, are a totally different story. There are four primary elements that go into making a quality Duplicated CD…media quality, on-disc printing, paper part printing and paper cutting. There are so many methods, quality of materials and machinery available that, from one duplicator to another, you will see a substantial difference in quality! This is important for you to know. Understanding On-Disc Print Quality First is the on-disc print quality. Print options for the disc artwork include laser labels, inkjet printers, or thermal printers. When printing is done with laser labels, labels are stuck on the disc-face and there is a potential for ‘peel off’. You can tell when a sticker label is used and often times you will not end up with a professional looking product. The next option is inkjet printers that can print on CD labels or, in some cases, on the disc face itself. The biggest problem with inkjet printers is that the ink typically rubs off the disc or label. Some companies laminate over top of the ink which can help with this problem. By far, the best way to print on a disc is to use Chroma Plus printing! At Ultra Entertainment, we use Chroma Plus Disc printing exclusively! Chroma Plus is a 600 DPI digital print that is fused to the top of the disc and lacquer coated to protect the print. It produces a glossy 600 DPI print and provides the best on disc print possible! It provides the highest resolution available on a printed disc with a glossy shine! Our Duplication process provides the highest quality in the industry and it is near impossible to tell the difference between our Replicated products versus our Duplication product. While Replication is the highest quality disc production available, more and more artists are turning to Duplication to save costs and to meet quick turn times. Now you can do it too without sacrificing a thing! The bottom line is that the quality of our on-disc print is as good as the quality on our large run replication CDs! You will not find this with most Duplication companies. Understanding Paper, Printing and Cutting Quality The next thing to consider is the quality of the paper parts. When doing large run replication, expensive plates are made to print on the paper. You have to run at least 1000 prints to be able to pay for those expensive plates and still make some profit. For small run Duplication more affordable digital presses are used for short run printing. These printers can range from $300 at your local computer store all the way up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Very few digital presses can produce the quality that offset presses (replication process) produce. Recently, advancements by Xerox have allowed the production of printers that do, in fact, rival the quality of offset presses but they are very expensive. These printers produce streak free, glossy print, and are at a resolution of 2400 DPI! We exclusively use these printers at Ultra Entertainment. Our paper parts are the finest you will find anywhere! In addition, we utilize digital cutting systems designed just for digital prints. These cutting machines allow us to cut and fold the paper parts with the highest level of accuracy and produce folds that don’t crack! Our insert and tray card print is processed from the same press that we use on our replication runs. And with our Chroma Plus disc printing, the CD print quality is equal and in most cases better than Offset or Silkscreen! Your duplicated package will have professional over-wrap and barcode. We even use Diamond Discs so you will have the silver-back disc just like with replication. The only difference between Duplication and Replication is the way the discs are created. It is important to note that some older CD players may have a hard time tracking duplicated discs. To help offset, we burn our discs at 8 times to make the highest quality duplication available. This makes it easier for CD players to reliably track our duplicated discs. Our competition will burn your discs at 40X plus! Experience our Duplication quality today!!