We purchased a new Primera Bravo II CD/DVD Publisher this week because we're doing a lot more DVD's and Blu-ray discs than ever before. The Bravo II is a robot DVD / CD burner and printer which can handle up to 50 discs in any one burning session, fully unattended. Perfect for our situation. We can burn / print DVD's and we can use it in print-only mode for the Blu-ray discs.
The big problem comes in its Mac compatibility. First off, the printer does not work at all using the Primera software in Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard). To use the Bravo II in automated print mode from their own software, you have to run in Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger). To use the Bravo II in Leopard you have to use something like Apple's Preview to do the printing of the discs, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of automated, unattended burning / printing.
Regardless of whether the machine is used in Tiger or Leopard, the printer drivers simply do not work correctly on the Mac. The colors print very muddy and muted instead of the vibrant colors we're expecting. We literally printed over 30 DVDs to test the printer using every conceivable combination of settings and testing RGB vs. CMYK. Bottom line, our $100 Epson ink-jet printer easily out-performed the $2,700 Bravo II.
Primera Tech Support was able to replicate our tests and confirm there is a problem with the Mac drivers. Their solution was for us to use a Windows XP machine instead of Mac. So I picked up a new iMac and installed Windows XP onto that machine since we had no Windows machines in our office. This does work almost perfectly. Still not exactly the colors we're looking for on the DVD's but with a bit more tweaking in Photoshop, we should be able to get the printed images to look as we expect.
The real problem I have here is Primera advertising this as a PC / Mac solution. This machine lists for $2,695.00. The compatibility is described thusly on their website: Bravo II is ideal for printing either one at a time, unique discs or jobs of up to 50 discs at a time. Models include both Windows-based PC and Mac software in every box. Now a normal business owner like myself is going to read that and expect the exact same performance on both a Mac and PC. You would be wrong.
I did not expect the Bravo II to work correctly on Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) since it is so new and there are a lot of issues out there. But OS 10.4 that has been out for over a year? That definitely not Mac support in my book. If we didn't need the machine so badly right at this moment, I would have returned it immediately. Unfortunately, we have deadlines to meet and just had to absorb the additional money for the iMac / Windows XP.
Just a word of warning for anyone else out there considering this unit or anything else from Primera. It does work pretty much as advertised on Windows XP, but not Mac.
