primera signature III color printer - Primera Technologies - Product Information

Emedia Professional, Feb, 2000 by Hugh Bennett

In 1997, when Fargo Electronics introduced the original Signature CD Color Printer, the new release set the market on its ear by making CD-R disc label printing available at moderate cost. The Signature's attractively low price, tray-loading design, and small size, however, were not sufficient to attract the production community. Key factors inhibiting its success in the production arena included the printer's low resolution, slow speed, and relatively primitive three-color inkjet technology. A year later, Fargo spun off its CD, sign, and label printer business to newly created Primera Technology, and an updated Signature II model appeared on the market. Unfortunately, while maintaining the attractive attributes of its predecessor, the Signature II offered nothing more than a slight improvement in printing speed.

Conventional wisdom seems to have held true and the third time has indeed proved the charm for Primera with the release of the Signature III CD Color Printer. Like its precursors, the $1,495 Signature III is a color inkjet system employing a Lexmark engine but, thanks to the latest technological advances, the printer's performance and output quality are greatly enhanced over the previous models. For example, maximum resolution of the Signature III has been extended to true 1200 x 1200dpi and speed has at least doubled. Addressing many of the issues that dogged its ancestors, the Signature III now offers the best combination of ease of use and overall value for any CD label printer in its price range and will surely find itself in demand by enthusiast and professional users alike.

signature look and feel

Compared to competing CD printers, the Signature III is positively diminutive, weighing in at a mere 8.5 pounds while housed in a stylishly compact 10.5"x 7.5" x 10.5" plastic case. Ink is supplied by a single three-color cyan, magenta, yellow (CMY) cartridge which can be swapped out in favor of a black (K)-only cartridge for more economical and vibrant monochrome printing.

Thanks to an exterior design which is the model of simplicity, attending to the Signature III is very straightforward. Controls on the top of the unit consist of three buttons (power on/off, tray open/close and ink cartridge replacement) as well as two indicator lights (power and busy status). The printer's rear panel contains a standard Centronics parallel and a mini 8-pin serial interface port for easy connection to PC and Macintosh computers as well as an auxiliary 6-pin port for integration into compatible disc-autoloading systems.

unpacking and installation

In addition to the printer, Primera ships each Signature III package with one-color ink cartridge, a holder for a spare ink cartridge, rive cardboard CD templates for test printing, an external power adapter, printer drivers for Windows 95/98/NT and Macintosh computers, and Island Software's Compact Disc Image Designer label creation software for Windows. Additional three-color and black ink cartridges can be purchased for $57.95 and $49.95 respectively. Fifty packs of the two-sided cardboard printing templates are available for $24.95.

Despite being a specialized device, the Signature III installs like a dream and setting it up and using it is much like configuring and working with any other inkjet printer. Low-level control over the output is exercised through the supplied printer driver which offers several useful features including selectable resolutions (1200 x 1200, 600 x 600, 600 x 300dpi), dithering optimization (photos, graphics), color matching (algebraic, Candela PrimaColor, ColorSync), overall ink saturation, as well as maintenance routines for changing ink cartridges, calibrating image positioning, and the like. A 32-bit spooler is also provided to speed up multiple job processing under Windows 95/98.

One feature that sets the Signature III's printer driver head and shoulders above its competition is its automatic masking of the center hole and area beyond the circumference of the disc to be printed. This capability eliminates any chance of making a mess by accidentally labeling outside of the disc's boundaries. Thanks to the masking feature and the printer's handy tray-loading design, the Signature III is fool-proof and a joy to use. The tray-loading mechanism makes the Signature III ideal for integration into automated in-line CD duplication and custom disc production systems such has been done in MediaFORM's CD-37031 Eclipse, Cedar Technologies' Desktop CD-R Publisher, and Microtech Systems' ImageAutomator 150 systems.

On the downside, however, is Primera's questionable choice of bundling Island Software's Compact Disc Image Designer labeling software. Awkward and downright annoying to use for anything but the simplest label, it should quickly drive Signature users to opt for just about any other application they can get their hands on (Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator, etc.) for creating their designs. Why Primera couldn't bundle better software--like Seagull Scientific's excellent BarTender package--with a printer in this price range is a mystery.