When you have been looking around the Swift Duplication website you may have noticed two terms ‘Litho’ and ‘Screen’ when looking at the different methods of printing on the disc. So what are they and what is the difference? Well they both have their advantages and disadvantages, screen printing of CDs and DVDs has been around for a lot longer than litho printing and in fact until a few years ago you couldn’t litho print onto recordable CDs or DVDs due the technical difficulties.

Screen Printing.

When CDs first came out this was the only means apart from pad printing to put an image on the disc this typically was only one or two colours but as time progressed it increase up to 6 colours. The advantage screen printing has over other forms of print is you can use single or spot colours or cover large areas of the disc with a single colour or different spot colours. A lot of companies are very brand aware and each colour has to be exact with this method you can use pantone colours to get an exact match. You can also print in full colour and get a reasonable result although the definition is a lot lower than litho typically 130 dots per inch (dpi) as opposed to 300dpi with litho print. 

Litho Print

Litho print is the same method as paper parts are printed. It gives a crisp clear image on the CD or DVD, if you would like to see an example of a litho printed disc have a look at a DVD from your film collection. The disadvantage is you can only do full colour work i.e. photos imagery. Up until recently you weren’t able to use this on CD-R or DVD-R as it stripped the top layer of the disc off making it unusable, however technology has moved on and now you can enjoy the same quality on your duplicated CDs and DVDs.

Both the above are a great way to have your discs printed but because of set-up times it only makes it viable on runs of a hundred plus. however there are some great ways to print discs on shorter runs which give a really good finish as well. I will go into this in greater detail in an other article. If you would like to find out more about CD and DVD Duplication and Replication visit our website at www.swiftduplication.com