WHO CAN SAVE THE UNIVERSE?
For many aspirational disc producers a fully automated DVD and CD publisher looks like the holy grail of the duplication world. A machine that can both copy and print discs in large batches without any human intervention. Automated disc publishers like those from Primera do offer a fantastic out of the box solution for the unattended production of 100’s of CD’s, DVDs and Blu-Ray. But, whilst entry level disc publishers of this type do exactly what they say on the box, they are not ideal for everybody.ink-jet disc printer.
The problem with disc publishers is that they are not scalable. The volume of your throughput is always determined by the imitations of the machine. Most £2000 automated disc publishers will have 1 or 2 disc burners built into the system, running alongside 1 inkjet printer.
When customers fist discover the opportunity afforded by disc publisher they often think that because it is automated they will be able to do a very high volume of discs. They are surprised to hear that the opposite is usually true. 2 optical disc recorders may produce a maximum of 2 4.7GB DVDs in 8 – 10 minutes, that’s 12-14 per hour. This is perfect if you have 24 hours to produce 100 discs, but what happens if you need to produce 200 discs in this time, or you copy the wrong content for you client by mistake, with a deadline that’s just 60 minutes away.
If you are thinking of starting a duplication business or building a requirement for disc duplication into your business then you should consider the following aspects:
01) What is your monthly production requirement
02) What is the maximum throughput of the equipment you intend to purchase
03) How scalable do you require the solution to be, ie do you need to account for growth
04) Do you require any redundancy, ie is the duplication hardware business critical and what will be the result if the hardware fails
05) Ease of maintenance and serviceability, ie how easy will it be to get your hardware fixed outside of warranty
At CD-writer.com Ltd we have been disccusing these aspects with customers every day for over 10 years. By talking to us we can help ensure you make the correct purchase decision. Surprisingly many, new to the industry over look the most obvious, most versatile and most profitable solution to their business needs.
The standalone tower Tower CD DVD Duplicator, combined with and automated disc printer, in our opinion offers a far better solution for most customers than an entry level disc publisher, and it will cost less too.
When you invest in a tower disc copier you will usually get from 7 to 15 target drives. Thats up to 15 times the production capacity of single drive publisher. Whats more because the resources on tower duplicator are dedicated they will operate up to 50% faster than burners in a PC hosted unit. So now we are looking at producing over 20X more DVD per hour than with a single drive publisher. Instead of producing a mere 6 DVDs per hour you are now producing 120, that’s easily over 1000 DVDs in an 8 hour working day.
But what about my disc printing I hear you cry! Well, there are many great automated disc printing solutions that feature the same advanced robotic disc loading systems as the publishers, but at a fraction of the cost. When you separate the printing process from the duplication process you are essentially getting much more control over the speed of production and a much great choice of printers. For example when producing Cd’s in a publisher the printing process may bottleneck the throughput when printing complex full colour, full face images. With an automated printer you can print a single disc in as little as 8 seconds, that’s probably an average of 6 per minute (including loading) with minimum print coverage. Suddenly, when combined with your manually operated tower disc copier you’ll find that you have real potential to make money by delivering large, complex duplication jobs in the shortest possible time.
Once you have established a stable business from delivering high quality product on time you should look at investing in either a complimentary publisher to work around the clock or a larger capacity automated solution such as an MFDigital Director. More on that next time.
So, to summarise, if you know your production requirement is no more than a few hundred DVD or a thousand CD in any one week then you could just about live with a twin drive £2000 publisher. However if you think you might exceed this throughput requirement then spend less and get a whole lot more by investing in a tower copier bundled with an automated disc printer.
See the cd dvd duplicator and disc printer bundles. Or call us on 020 8293 0777 for advice specific to your business needs.
