Primera DP-4102 Disc Publisher review

Dave Mitchell Read more June 21, 2011

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£2490

Price when reviewed

Primera doesn’t mince its words when it comes to its DP-4100 disc publishers: it claims they are the fastest in the world for their class. Part of a large range of different models, the DP-4102 on review comes with two DVD-RW drives and two input bins for a total capacity of 100 discs.

It has no network port, instead designed to be accessed locally via a USB connection. We found setup on a Windows 7 host system a simple affair. A wizard loads the drivers and tells you when to fill up the disc bins and connect the USB cable. It runs through some pre-flight checks to confirm the printer and robotics are ready for lift-off, and then loads Primera’s PTPublisher and SureThing label design software.

The appliance offers two modes, depending on how many discs you want for a publishing run. Normally, the right-hand bin is used to store up to fifty blanks, and the left-hand bin takes the published discs. Selecting the Kiosk mode from PTPubisher turns both into input bins. The centre slot becomes the output point, and Primera includes a metal support and 100-disc output bin that slots underneath the chassis and hangs from the desk edge.

Kiosk mode also allows you to put CD blanks in one input bin and DVDs in the other, and choose a source during the publishing process. Primera claims this makes the DP-4102 unique.

PTPublisher provides an extensive set of disc publishing tools, presented in well designed interface. Projects are used to store job details and you can create them for burning audio, video, data and disk images, copying discs or just printing them.

Advanced projects are used to rip audio files from existing optical media to your hard disk for use with iTunes and Windows Media Player. They can also be used for backup, where you schedule data projects to run regularly.

SureThing handles all label design, either run by PTPublisher during project creation or accessed separately. It’s just as easy to use: you choose background colours, insert graphics, add circular or rectangular text objects and save your jobs in a design library.

Jobs can be scheduled to run at specific times, or you can fire them off immediately and choose which input bin you want to use. For our first test, we created a data disc with 418MB of files and a custom label with graphics and a full colour background.

The total run time was only 3mins 24secs, with the final printing process taking 25 seconds. We found the six-second print time claimed by Primera is achievable, but only on the low or medium print quality settings. The former is only good for draft copies.

We then ran the project again, this time asking for eight copies and both drives to be used. The entire process was seamless, with the total runtime of 12 minutes giving an average disc creation time of just 1min 30secs.

For the price, Primera’s DP-4102 is one of the best disc publishing systems on the market. It’s ideal for a wide range of professional bulk publishing tasks, very easy to use and fast as well. We highly recommend it.