CD Printing

I just want to ask for a few ballpark estimates on what this should cost:

Each CD has a front cover, back cover, and printing on the CD. Behind the CD, the jewel case is plain black plastic.

I need 250 CD's like this. How much should I expect to pay?

There's no reason why you couldn't do this yourself. The only thing you need doing possibly, is the printed tops for the cd's.

For 250 CDs doing it yourself is kinda dumb. Ye gods, the wear on your equipment...

there ARE the new CDs that let you "print" directly on them by burning them in your CD burner...

Lots of printers can print directly on CDs. I know there are a few Epson models that do that (and more) and aren't too expensive.

I am not asking for advice on how to do it myself. I only wanted a few estimates of what I should expect to pay to have them professionally done.

250 will most likely get expensive. Maybe even like $300-500? It's when you make an order for 2000+ that it starts to get cheaper per unit. Look around on the web, you'll find some companies that can do this for you.

There are basically two types of CD's you can get: professionally duplicated CD-R's, and 'real' CD's.

The CD-R's will be cheaper in a small batch like yours. 'Real' CD's are pressed rather than burned, but require a unique master disc to be made, which is fairly pricy. Additional copies are pretty cheap, but you need a fairly large batch before it's cheaper than going the CD-R route.

(There are a ton of places that will do bulk replication of CD-R's for you as well, including full color labels, jewel cases, inserts, etc.) don't have any experience with any companies myself, but a quick google for 'cd duplication services' or something should give you a zillion leads.

One way to do it (audio = data):

http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/products/audio

About $1-2 per unit for a Yellowbook CD in small production run. Daniel and Marc is correct about the price per unit drops drasticly when you need more than 1000, primarily because the cost of the glass master is spread wider.

Ofcourse depending on who your duplikator is they make keep your master, making subsequent production runs somewhat cheaper.

If you get some more CD's you can get the price down to under a $1 ... I think about $0.70 for like 5,000. You'll probably pay around $2 for only 250 though.

Not sure about CDs, I was comparing the price for DVDs lately.
I'd think the price is around 3.50 for a small number of DVDs when burned. As other people said, the Master DVD (aka Mother DVD) that is required to produce real DVDs will cost about 350$, depending on the company. Producing 2000 pieces is good, the price will be around 1 dollar, printed with inlay, cover and case. There are also diffrent color models for the DVD printing, one color, two colors and 4 colors. 1 color (black on silver) should be enouh IMHO and makes the whole thing a lot cheaper.

So before you order 250 pieces of burned CDs, with some spray-fixed printings for 1200$, think about to double the money you spend to get 8 times the number of CDs, in real pro quality (note burned CDs will also be unreadable much earlier)