Hi, I need to buy a one-to-many DVD duplicator tower but am totally ignorant in my decision process. This reminds me of my first car buying experience. Can someone out there give me the hints on what to compare? I have searched the Internet. It looks a 1-to-7 duplicator tower will fit my budget and my demand. But among the companies that sell DVD duplicators, http://www.newcyberian.com http://www.octave.com http://www.discmakers.com , for example, there is substantial price difference for the same number of target drives. What's the catch? What questions should I ask when I contact these companies?
Despite their different appearances, almost all DVD duplicators are powered by the controllers from few companies. Acard, Wytron, Copystars, etc. By and large these companies offers pretty good products. The companies selling the DVD duplicators only assemble the DVD writers and the controller card to a multiple bay chassis. They have no control over the quality except for the price and the workmanship. Assuming the same number of target drive, these are the questions you should ask. 1. What brand of DVD writer they use? For example, NEC, ASUS, Pioneer, Sony, Toshiba, etc. Based on most reviews, I believe Pioneer is so for the best. 2. What's the cache memory? This is not very important for 1 to 1 or 1 to 3 but will become an important factor when the target number increases. 3. What control card they are using? ACARD seems to be the dominant player in the market with the highest performance to price ratio. Other controller cards are also good and sometimes with better features to compete with ACARD. 4. Whether the DVD duplicator comes with an internal cache hard drive. If not, you should deduct the price of the hard drive for pricing comparasion. With all these questions asked, I bet the salesman will think you are the expert and won't attempt to fool you. Good luck! Chuck
Hi, I built my own Duplicator and saved bucks. I went with a 11 burner capable Copystar contoller that comes with the IDE cables, found a nine Bay Case with power supply and two cooling fans that is for Duplicators, and 16X Lite-on burners and a DVD ROM all on sale and free shipping. The case even came with all the mounting hardware. It took less than two hours to assemble as it is all standard plug-in connectors. I saved a 1/3 to 1/2 off retail. I haven't put in the 80 gig hard drive I have laying around but really haven't seen the need as all you do is put in the master disk and the blanks and push run. I have had no problems and have burned over a couple thousand CD's and numerous DVD's. Trying to do a side buisness for the local bands and a few tutorial, family DVD's. I just searched the sites mentioned above and caught the drives on sale at NewEgg. I got the nine bay case on sale really cheap so I went with that than an 11 bay case. Good Luck
