Home CD duplication - does it really save you money?
In the current economic climate we are all constantly looking for ways to save money on everything. This is no less the case in the world of CD printing, but while printing your CDs at home may look cheaper on the outside, there is strong evidence to suggest this is in fact a false economy and it is less expensive to get a professional company to do it in the long run.
To start, let’s examine the cost of the CDs themselves, especially in relation to the quality you will be getting. It goes without saying that the cheaper a CD is, the less likely it is to be of good quality: There are no free rides in the digital world and if a price is very low, the chances are that somewhere a corner has been cut in terms of quality. For CDs this may mean a much shorter life span, which means that your CD product would need replacing some years sooner than if you had had the CD produced by a duplication company. Thus, if you print at home, you could be paying almost twice as much for the same product in the long run.
To add to this, if you do home CD printing then there will be far fewer quality tests in place. CD printing businesses have a very high level of standard quality, where each CD is thoroughly tested for any faults. Home CD printing could allow faulty CDs to be overlooked, which means that you might lose very important data or, if you are sending out your CDs to consumers for advertising or commercial purposes, could mean that people come away with the impression that you are unprofessional because your product does not work!
On a similar note, you will get a much more professional finish to your product if you use a CD printing company than at home. The print on the disc will be done using the correct machinery, which it is extortionately expensive to buy yourself. Also, unless you have an incredibly good printer, the booklet and inlay will be of a higher print quality if you use a credible company. A good-looking CD with high quality packaging and an attractive cover and body print will entice consumers and look far more professional. This effect is very expensive to achieve yourself and so, in the long run, it is far cheaper to use a CD printing company.
On a more personal note, it takes a lot of time to produce CDs at home, which ends up wasting a lot of your precious hours! If you pay someone else to do it for you, you may well end up saving a lot of money by achieving other things with your time instead. It also puts far less strain on you personally, especially if you have a looming deadline! Professional CD printers are used to working to a deadline and some of them even offer next day delivery, which means that you can rest assured that the job will be finished on time and to a high standard, without the worry of having to do it yourself.
So while it may look like in the short term it is cheaper to buy that very cheap roll of discs and do all the CD printing yourself at home, it can in the long run mean that your product needs replacing faster (costing you more money!), is more likely to allow a product through which is faulty (losing you precious data or customers, costing you more money!), ultimately does not look as good (again, losing you consumers and giving people an unprofessional opinion of you, losing you more money) and all this only having been done so that you can have more stress and worry! Therefore, I would say, it is less stressful and more economically sound in the long run to get a professional CD printing business to do your CD printing for you so you can relax, knowing the job is getting done fast and to a very high standard!