BRAVO II IS A WELCOME ENCORE
Around a year and a half ago, I first wrote about an amazing new disc publishing system from Primera Technology called the Bravo Disc Publisher. For those of you who may have missed it, the Bravo is an all-in-one peripheral that allows you to fully publish a CD or DVD disc from start to finish. The Bravo automates the entire process by first burning the disc and then printing the color artwork directly onto the disc itself without using a label.
When the process begins, the Bravo uses a little robotic arm that glides over the stack of discs and lifts one up to be recorded. After burning the disc, the robot arm moves the disc to the built-in inkjet printer that proceeds to print a full color image directly onto the disc itself. When printed, the little robotic arm slides the completed disc into the receptacle that holds the finished discs. Just watching the Bravo do its thing can be entertaining. In fact, the lid on the Bravo is transparent just so you can sit and watch the entire process happen over and over again.
But time has passed and like so many great ideas that are ahead of its time, the folks at Primera have been contemplating how they could improve upon a good thing. With the all the new improvements and additions that have been incorporated into the next generation product, it's apparent that they haven't just been sitting around watching those little discs being burned and printed. Introducing the Bravo II Disc Publisher. 
The first thing Primera has improved upon is the printing resolution. The dpi has been increased from 2400 to an impressive 4800 dots-per-inch (dpi). That's really saying something since according to Mark D. Strobel, Primera's Vice President of Sales & Marketing, the typical resolution of graphical images produced on professionally silk-screened discs are typically done at a much lower resolution. I would have to agree with him since the disc samples I've seen printed on the Bravo II are some of the cleanest and sharpest I've seen.
Like its predecessor, the Bravo II does not use disc labels. It uses specially designed optical discs that have a printable surface. So far, these discs come in either a white or a silver metallic finish. The printable discs have been available for some time now and can be found most anyplace that sells burnable optical media. The cost of these printable discs are around the same a their non-printable counterparts.
The Bravo II is now capable of printing up to 50 discs at a time with the optional Bravo Kiosk Mode Kit. The included software lets you produce one unique disc at a time so that you can print the same disc or different discs within the same 50 disc publishing / printing job.
Also with the Bravo II, Primera has introduced their new AccuDisc Technology. Given all the new enhancements with the Bravo II, Primera had to develop a method that insured the "picking" accuracy of the little robotic arm that must precisely pick the discs up and place them into the exact position for duplication and printing. According to Primera, AccuDisc is a suite of hardware and firmware enhancements that provide the most accurate and precise disc picking available today. Utilizing advanced LED optics instead of mechanical components, AccuDisc eliminates misalignment of the pick mechanism. It also prevents the feeding of double discs into the recordable drive which continues to be a common problem with other picking systems.
In addition to the standard 120mm optical CD and DVD discs, the Bravo II also works with several of the business card-shaped and mini CD/DVD formats via an optional media adapter kit.
Included with each Bravo II is the publishing software. Using the faster USB 2.0 interface, the same Bravo II unit will work on either a Windows PC or Macintosh running OS X. The professional burning software from Sonic for the PC or Charismatic Engineering's Discribe V5.0 for the Mac allows virtually any digital information to be duplicated. SureThing CD Labeler Primera Edition Software for the PC and Discus Labeling Software for the Mac is also included. Every Bravo II comes with the software for one platform. If you intend to use the same Bravo II on both platforms, the additional software for the other platform can be purchased separately.
The Bravo II is available in several different configurations that include CD, CD/DVD and Print-Only models. Check with Primera for model pricing information. Printing and duplication times have also been improved. These speeds depend in part on how you have your Bravo II configured. Check with Primera for more details on burning and printing time speeds.
The Bravo was the first disc publishing system to offer an affordable solution to anyone wanting to duplicate somewhere between one and a thousand discs without having to go through the tedium of publishing one disc at a time on a computer, or spending large amounts of money hiring a disc publishing service. The Bravo II improves upon that solution by doing everything faster and producing a higher quality disc image. To Primera, I say "Bravo too."
http://www.primera.com |
