Primera Autoprinter Bravo 4100

We use this thing every week to print our church services for distribution to elderly shut-ins and various other needs. We are pleased with it's responsiveness and somewhat conservative use of the ink. Color reproduction gets a little iffy at times, but all in all it performs well -- especially if you give it a decent quality disc to print on.

We have only had this for a few weeks but so far we love it. The options for colors and images are endless and it is very easy to use. The label actually prints in about 3 seconds. If you do a lot of DVDs, like we do, expect to go through a lot of ink.

This printer has taken me some time to get to know. It has it quirks, but in the end has proven to be a real life saver.

We have had this for less than 3 months and the gears are grinding. We had an old Primera for 7-8 years with 500,000 prints on it. This has less than 600 prints. We have to send it in for repair and we will be without a machine for over a week. This should be a work horse....

I've owned a Bravo 4100 since 2013. When it works, it works great, when it doesn't I wish I'd never purchased it. When I go to use it, I end up throwing out cartridges that say they are 46-70% full because the cartridge dried out, or because I see defects in the printing. Worst of all I end up throwing out half the disks I print because the colors stop coming out partway through. Replacing the cartridges does fix the problem, but only until the next time I use it. My Epson does 1 disk at a time, but at least it does't dry out every time I want to use it for disk printing. I'll probably start saving up for a replacement. Right now, this ink well is just costing me money.

Quick Delivery; easy to set up; did not need to update Cptr to use because the same software package; Only had to install drivers.

**** See my IMPORTANT updates at the end **** I have owned a Primera Bravo II Autoprinter for many years (I reviewed it here on Amazon), and ran many thousands of CDs and DVDs through it (as an autoprinter, it does not burn the disks, and simply prints on them). The machine was unreliable for many years, and had to be sent to Primera a few times for repairs. I finally found that a combination of running a direct USB connection from the computer's rear USB plug instead of through a USB router, and also upgrading to Windows 7 and installing a newer driver and a later version of the SureThing printing software, resulted in that old printer becoming very reliable. But still, there were issues: - It did not reliably estimate available ink in the color cartridge, so the printer would stop mid-batch even when there was still ink, or it would not realize that ink had run out and still tried to continue printing, ruining several disks before I noticed the problem. - It often refused to retain the information that I had replaced a cartridge, and kept insisting that ink was low. - If there was a problem with a print job, the printer did not recover properly and it took a tedious process to reset everything. - 1 minute and 46 seconds per disk; not bad if I set up a batch and was not in a hurry, but much slower than I would like. - The robot did lots of seemingly unnecessary movements, wasting time. Then in 2015 I started to encounter availability problems with the ink cartridges. My normal supply chain was unable to get the Primera cartridges, and the emergency backup scheme of buying a Lexmark cartridge and transferring the bar code from an old Primera cartridge to the Lexmark one was no longer possible because it seemed that the Lexmarks were no longer available either. Then Primera advised that Lexmark had stopped making the cartridges, both under their own name, and also the special version for Primera. I was told by Primera that they arranged for Lexmark to make one more big batch of cartridges, and the most distributors were no longer buying this last batch from Primera, so orders needed to be placed directly, and that supplies were limited. Amazon sellers often had raised prices for existing stock as high as $200 per cartridge! I decided that I had beat this horse long enough and that the critter was surely dead. Time to upgrade. It seemed that the only autoprinters on the market were the newer Primera Bravo 4100, and a model by Epson. I could find very few reviews on the Epson, but it looked good. I found a video showing how it worked, and it sure looked slow. And I found few distributors stocking the special Epson cartridges, so I supposed that I might have availability problems. The newer Primera product, just like the old Bravo II, uses a proprietary version of a standard Lexmark cartridge type (actually four cartridges in three colors plus black), but it seemed that lots of distributors stocked the Primera ink, so availability should be better than the Epson. And there were lots of good reviews on the 4100 and also online videos showing how fast its robot and print engine were. So I went with the Primera Bravo 4100. I need to note here that I did not buy my 4100 from Amazon. Primera offered a buy-back type program for existing users of the Bravo II, knocking about $300 off the normal street price of the 4100, so I bought directly from them. The 4100 has the same form factor as the Bravo II, using exactly the same footprint for the printer itself. However, the 4100 is much taller, and also the kiosk kit for front disk discharge sticks out a bit more to the front than the one did on the Bravo II. The 4100 comes with three pieces of software on a CD-ROM; the printer driver, the SureThing label design & printing software, and the PTPublisher printing utility. The three programs install automatically in sequence, and I saw no option to install only some of the software. So I ended up with two copies of SureThing on my computer; the copy I had for the Bravo II and the new copy. The installer did not check to see if SureThing might already be installed. This does not cause a problem, and I did not uninstall the extra copy either. SureThing allows design of a disk 'label' (even though no actual label is used...the printer prints directly on the surface of any inkjet printable disk), and you can then print the label to the Bravo 4100 directly from SureThing. But doing it this way does not show any printer status; this is no worse than what I was used to with the Bravo II. The new PTPublisher software application is a publish-only application; you can not use it to design anything. If you have one of the other models in this series [i.e. printers that also include disk burner drive(s)], PTPublisher will send the disk data image to the printer's drive(s), as well as sending the graphics 'label' image to the printer. In my case, with the 4100 autoprinter, PTPublisher recognizes that the device does not do burning, and grays out those options, showing only the printing option. I design a label in SureThing, and then open the label in PTPublisher, and then print from that application. The nice thing about PTPublisher is that it shows lots of printer status. It shows graphical depictions of the printer's IN and OUT disk bins, and how many disks are in each bin. It shows a constantly updated set of bar graphs for ink levels in the four cartridges. And it shows print status. As with SureThing, PTPublisher allows all the printer options to be changed as required (e.g. print quality, whether to discharge printed disks to BIN 2 or to the front kiosk bin, inner and outer diameters of printable areas on the disks, etc). Other that the slight inconvenience of having to use a second application for the actual printing if I want to see status, this all works well. The main issue I see with the above arrangement is that PTPublisher will hard crash my computer if I try using it while SureThing is still open. I MUST exit SureThing before launching PTPublisher. I checked with Primera, and they agreed that this behavior is not a fluke on my computer, and that the two programs cannot be open at the same time. This is very odd behavior for Windows applications. By the way, the SureThing app that gets installed is version 5, the same version that I had more recently used for my Bravo II; apparently no upgrades have happened on that app in quite a few years. But this version recognizes both the older Bravo II and the newer 4100 series printers, so it will work with both, and more importantly, the file format is the same, so if you migrate to the Bravo 4100 from an older Primera printer that also used SureThing, there is no issue with compatibility and you can still print your old designs using the newer printer. And it is even backwards compatible. If I had gone with the Epson printer, I would have had a much bigger issue with compatibility. So, the 4100 itself....... Maximum disk capacity is 100; you normally put up to 50 disks in the right bin, and the robot places printed disks in the left bin which also holds up to 50. If you change the printer to 'kiosk mode' where printed disks discharge out the front to a third bin with a capacity of 100, then the left bin can also be used to hold unprinted disks. The 4100's robot is very fast. It is able to check inventory in each disk bin in just a few seconds. It does this by lowering the disk picker into each bin until it touches the top disk in the bin's stack. It only takes a couple seconds for it to pick a disk from a bin and place it in the printing tray, and then another couple seconds to remove a printed disk from the tray and place it in either the other bin or out the front unto the kiosk bin. This is SO much better than the old Bravo II. The Lexmark inkjet print engine inside the Bravo 4100 has a very different design from the Bravo II. Whereas the older printer used ink cartridges that incorporated the actual print heads, the 4100 uses ink cartridges that are simply ink containers, and the print head is a separate item. Also, instead of the Bravo II's single color cartridge plus black cartridge (which I never used, since I got better results by telling the printer to make black by mixing colors), the 4100 uses three color cartridges (the usual cyan, yellow, magenta colors) plus a higher capacity black cartridge. I did not notice an option on the 4100 to NOT use the black cartridge. You can buy the different cartridges separately, or bundled in a pack that has one of each color. The price per cartridge is something like $29 each, while the combo pack is something like $116. Compare this with the $59 that I usually paid for each Bravo II color cartridge, which had much lower ink capacity. I was always concerned with the Bravo II that I would print a design that was heavy on red, for example, and have to discard the cartridge for further printing even of the other colors of ink were still mostly full. I often designed subsequent labels to favor different colors and thereby hopefully even out the usage of the colors in the single cartridge. Now, with the 4100, I change only the color that has run out, although I now need to stock more cartridges to make sure that I always have at least one of each color on the shelf. But at least the ink capacity of the new cartridges is much greater than what was in the Bravo II cartridges, so I think the new system is a much better deal and overall ink cost should be quite a bit lower than before. On the Bravo II, I could optionally buy the Lexmark cartridge and move the barcode strip from a Primera cartridge to the Lexmark one, so that the printer would accept it after the scan it performed before each print operation. On the 4100 cartridges, instead of a barcode it uses RFID chips in each cartridge, and the print head carriage moves the cartridges under an RFID antenna before each print operation in order to verify that a valid type of ink has been installed. The printer keeps track of how much ink is used from each cartridge, and apparently associates this in memory with the cartridges' RFID numbers. This means that if you try and refill a cartridge, the printer will refuse to use it because the RFID number correlates in printer memory with an empty cartridge. In fact the RFID chip is just a small flat piece of plastic (with an embedded chip) that is placed between the cartridge's label and the cartridge's top surface. There are replacement RFID chips available online, and if you refill a cartridge, you peel back the cartridge label, lift off the RFID chip, replace it with the new chip, and stick the label back down. I DON'T know whether this trick could also be used with the regular Lexmark versions of these cartridges. At any rate, I have had poor results with trying to refill cartridges on other printers, and pretty much always just buy new cartridges these days, so I cannot add more information on this from personal experience. The 4100 print engine, at 'normal' quality setting, prints a disk in 6 seconds. In 'high' quality setting, it takes about 10 seconds per disk. Couple this print speed with the very fast robot, and it is clear the Primera's claim to being the fastest disk printer is justified. The print head is a separate plastic assembly, and it can be replaced just as easily as an ink cartridge. The print head snaps onto the printer's print head carriage, then the four cartridges snap onto the top of the print head. Electrical contacts on the print head match up with contacts on the print head carriage. Apparently, Primera has experienced some issues with this connector getting dirty, so the 4100 comes with a few prepackaged alcohol wipes, and they recommend cleaning the contacts every time the print head is changed. You can use any other brand of wipes, such as those drugstores sell for disinfecting or for cleaning glasses lenses, or even rubbing alcohol on a lint-free cloth. I think I like this arrangement of having the replaceable print head, since I have thrown away other inkjet printers when their inaccessible print heads got too clogged to be cleared. I already bought a replacement print head just to have it readily available, and it cost about $75. Primera recommends leaving the 4100 turned on during periods of inactivity. For example, if you were to not use the 4100 for a couple months, the print head might well clog up for good, and it would have to be replaced. It might be possible to remove the print head and soak it in water or something, but good luck with that. Primera states that if the printer is left powered, it will periodically run a print head maintenance routine. During shorter periods of disuse, it should be OK to turn the power off, maybe for a few days. Otherwise, plan on leaving the printer powered up all the time just to be safe. As of November 2016, I am on my second 4100 because the first one had an intermittent issue that caused it to sometimes do a hard reset in the middle of a print batch. On the second 4100, I have now printed only about 200 disks, but expect to be ramping up to a lot more before the end of the year. No malfunctions on the second 4100 so far, at least not ones related to the machine itself (the software is another issue, see below). Another big improvement over the Bravo II is that the AC power cord plugs directly into the printer....no separate power supply on the 4100! Some reviews state that the power supply is 'switchable' between 120V and 240V, but I don't see a switch on the printer. I conclude that there is a universal power supply inside the 4100 that can handle any AC voltage, regardless of county. I think the mistake comes from some people's misinterpretation of "switching power supply". As with the Bravo II, the 4100 has two buttons and two LEDs on top. One button is the power switch and the other is used for telling the printer that you want to change a cartridge, or for resetting if the robot happens to get hung up for some reason. The two LEDs indicate POWER and BUSY/PRINTING. Certain error conditions will cause these LEDs to flash in different patterns, as described by a chart in the manual. I printed an adhesive label with a small version of the error code chart, and stuck it on the printer next to the buttons. In addition to the above mentioned two LEDs, the 4100 has two additional LEDs inside the cover; these normally provide illumination inside the printer so you can more easily see what is going on inside. If the printer has a problem, these LEDs flash to get your attention. If the ink is getting low, these LEDs cycle their intensity between normal brightness and dim. Using PTPublisher, and going into the printer options, you can disable the internal blue LEDs, for example if you find the blue glow annoying, as it might be the case if it were in a bedroom, or in a room that gets used with lowered lighting. But if you disable those LEDs, you will not get the status that they can provide, and would have to check the PTPublisher software to get that status. As with the Bravo II, the 4100 normally will not operate with the cover open. I have not tried tricking the printer, so I don't know if this is feasible. The 4100 uses ONLY a USB connection to the computer; it does NOT have wired Ethernet or Wi-Fi connectivity. If you buy one of the versions of this printer that also have disk drives, then there are additional connectors on the back, since USB is not used for sending the disk data image to the printer. Unlike the Bravo II, the front kiosk kit (metal bracket and plastic high capacity bin) comes with the 4100 and does not need to be obtained separately. Assuming that the 4100 lasts as long as my Bravo II without problems, this printer should be a winner. **** UPDATE September 2016 .....see additional update below **** I bought my Bravo 4100 Autoprinter in the Spring of 2016, but still had my older Bravo II, and had several ink cartridges for it that I wanted to use up before getting rid of it. I tested the new 4100 on a few disks just to make sure it was working, then set it aside while I used up ink on the Bravo II. This got me through all the CDs I had to make before a hiatus over the Summer months, so I realized that the 4100 would not be used at all for about three months. I asked Primera, and they said if I left the 4100 powered on all the time over the Summer, that it would do an automatic periodic ink purge to keep the print head from clogging, so I followed their advice. In September 2016, I needed to start using the 4100, but I quickly found that the print head was clogged. I ran the head cleaning procedure (from software) twice, and this DID get the head working again. When I asked Primera why I needed to clean the head at all since simply leaving the 4100 powered up was supposed to prevent clogging, they replied that leaving it powered up does not prevent clogging, rather it keeps the clogs from being so severe that they cannot be cleaned, in which case a new $100 print head would be required. They NOW state that the only way to prevent head clogging is to use the printer fairly frequently. I understand that with ANY inkjet printer, it needs to be used periodically or there will be problems with clogging. In the future I will plan to leave the printer powered at all times, and also mark my calendar to run a sacrificial CD or DVD through it every couple of weeks just to keep those inky juices flowing. More critically, however, was that when I started to use the 4100 in earnest, I found that it would misbehave every few disks. Apparently I did not test it for long enough when I first got it, and was just lucky that it did not act up during those tests. I had the Bravo 4100 in the same location on my work area as the older Bravo II had been at for many years. I even used the same power cord and USB cable as the Bravo II had used. Even the same USB port on the computer was being used for the 4100. Nevertheless, I found that the 4100 would screw up in one way or another every few disks, sometimes more often, sometimes it could manage to print more disks before something went wrong. The failures involved stalling in the middle of printing a disk, or the robot moving the wrong way or not at all, or the printer repeatedly printing the same disk over and over. Worse than this, every time the printer had an issue, the associated software (either Primera SureThing or Primera PTPublisher) would crash, and even more troubling, the software crash would take the computer down with it....Windows would totally lock up, no response to the mouse or keyboard, and I had to do power cycle to bring it back. I contacted Primera and they said all of this was consistent with communications failure. They agreed that their software is not robustly written, so it cannot deal with any kind of communications (USB) interruption without crashing, and that the way it is written, Windows will also crash along with it. This is TERRIBLE! I can pull the USB cord on any other device I have in the middle of use and the worst that happens is I get an error message and have to click an "X" to clear the message. Primera should seriously consider revamping their hardware and software product line to accept wired Ethernet and/or WiFi connectivity (at least for the AutoPrinter version), and make the software more robust. Primera asked if the 4100 was connected to the computer via a USB hub, and it was not (however, the Bravo II had been for a while, and during that time it also had problems involving the robotic movements, so I got rid of the hub and direct connected it to the computer again.....but it NEVER crashed the software). Primera then asked how long my USB cable was, and my reply was 16 feet. This had not been a problem for the Bravo II (and I still use daily a big industrial wide format printer on a 20 foot USB cable that never misses a beat), and before purchasing the 4100 I had asked Primera directly if the 4100 was sensitive to USB cable length, and their reply was that it did not have the sensitivity to cables and hubs that the Bravo II had suffered from. But NOW, Primera stated that the 4100 cannot be expected to work correctly all of the time if the USB cable is longer than 6 feet! So I temporarily relocated the 4100 right in front of the computer, and used the 6 foot USB cable that came with the 4100, connecting directly to the computer. I ran a small batch of CDs, and it worked flawlessly. This SEEMS to validate Primera's statements. I will have larger batches of CDs to do soon, and hope that the printer continues to behave with the shorter cable. But I cannot leave the printer in that location, and the workspace has a lot of built-in furniture and I cannot think of a place to put the 4100 permanently that will allow a 6 foot cable to reach the computer. The 4100 will need to be carried into position every time I need to use it. I regard this incredible cable sensitivity to be inexcusable. No piece of modern equipment should be so picky, and no decently written software should crash so sloppily that it wipes Windows along with it. However, I don't know of any good alternatives, and I wanted to stay with Primera because I have a large library of disk artwork and images in their format that I am often called upon to reprint onto new batches of CDs, and don't have time to re-do them all into some other format. ****** UPDATE - November 2016 ***** I had another batch of issues where the printer was glitching or hanging up or stalling in an inconsistent manner. I had a few long instance where Primera tech support took over remote control of my computer and did tests and diagnostics, and a few more where my Dell Pro Support engineers took remote control and did computer and Windows diagnostics. The consensus was that my computer, which runs an office all by itself and which has a room full of USB, Ethernet and WiFi connected specialty equipment, as well as 8 different printers, 4 scanners, and some other stuff, was probably just too complex of a system, with too many diverse drivers and apps, and that this caused the Primera software some difficulties. There were no 'normal' issues with the computer...it passed all tests with flying colors, has a quick response time and was not sluggish, and has plenty of memory and disk space. Still, it was recommended by both Primera and Dell that I move the 4100 over to a less complex, mainstream, computer. I realized that for this printer to work properly and reliably, and to be located somewhere other than the floor in front of my computer (due to short USB cable length restrictions), and to deal with the computer/software issues, I would need to buy another computer to run the 4100. I found a good location in another room, on the corner of a table adjacent to a short bookcase. I found a Dell sale on basic notebook computers, $300 each, and bought one/ With the new computer on top of the bookcase and the 4100 on the corner of the table, the recommended 6 foot USB reaches nicely between them. There are no other apps on the computer, not even Office. So far with this setup, the 4100 and its software has worked flawlessly. I did notice an oddity of PTPublisher that I had not experienced with it on my other computer (and this might be version specific), that the latest 2.2.6 version only recognizes disk image files on the C: drive. On my original computer, only the OS was on C: so I was not too fond of that arrangement. With the new computer, it only has a C: drive, so no issues there. Currently, I create the disk image in SureThing on my main computer, then copy the SureThing file to an SD memory card. I take that to the other room, stick it into the SD slot on the new computer, copy the file to the C: drive (in a Primera folder), and then use PTPublisher to print to the 4100. Eventually, I suppose that I will set up the two computers to communicate with each other over WiFi and then be able to share the SureThing files without using the SD card method, or I might choose to use DropBox as a means to share the files. Actually, the SD card method is simple and quick, and I don't know if it will really be worthwhile to do the more elaborate methods. So, my recommendation for the 4100 is that you plan to place it directly next to your computer if you want it to work reliably. And if your computer is not very new, or if you have a lot of stuff installed on it, you should seriously consider buying a low cost basic computer to be dedicated to the 4100.

This printer is the cats meow when it comes to printing CD & DVD's...simply love it.

Very fast!