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Subject:Re: CD Production Advice From:Ginna Watts <gwatts -at- PIM -dot- BC -dot- CA> Date:Wed, 10 Sep 1997 10:52:52 -0700
At 01:17 PM 9/9/97 -0700, ckime wrote:
> Techwhirlers,
> One of my co-workers (our QA person) is assessing the feasibility of
> shipping our cross-platform software product and doc on CD. The first
> release is likely to be very low volume, perhaps even on-demand type
> of production.
We just this year went down this road, so I can offer some thoughts:
CD burners have come down in price significantly--we bought a good quality
8X one for less than $1000 (Canadian, that is). We had a little trouble
finding one with an NT 4.0 driver, but that's a different story.
We decided to burn the first hundred or so of our software CDs
individually, because eventually we wanted to burn all platforms together
when we sent out a large run.
This was more expensive than sending them out--there's no question about
it. BUT the cost per CD still worked out to less than $5.00 each. We buy
blanks (TDK) for $250 per 100 (plus the ever prevalent CND tax, of course).
We had several hundred silk-screened with the product info and logo for
about $1.00 each.
We are getting ready to send a large run, but have been very happy with the
CD burner. After the first few weeks, we were only burning one or two a
week. And when your software retails in the thousands, $5 or $6 dollars per
CD doesn't seem significant.
All that considered, we probably would not have bought the CD burner if we
couldn't get other uses out of it. The other half of the company needs to
archive significant amounts of data on a regular basis. We used to archive
to tape, but this made the info difficult to retrieve at the desktop. We
now burn data CDs almost every day. We also deliver almost all our external
work on CD. Our burner paid for itself in only a few weeks.
Hope this helps,
Ginna
Ginna Watts - Technical Writer
Pacific International Mapping Corp.
250-727-0727
gwatts -at- pim -dot- bc -dot- ca
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