How do you duplicate? Yourself?

[wonder]

im interested in these stand alone duplicators. Does anyone use/have them or do you sub out your dupe work?

[studiodog]

I've got an EMac with a 32x burner. When we have large dupe runs, which for us is 100 -400, I just set the EMac next to the wife and me while watching TV in the evening.

Using Toast we can make 100 or more a night depending on the program length. Toast kicks out the finished disc and you grab it and pop in a blank. It really is easy and any modern Mac with a hi-speed burner would do it. Hard to justify a lot of money on a dedicated dupe system that might only get used 1-2 percent of the time.
When that run is over the EMac goes back to it's place to get used as normal.

Of course this is my situation. If you need to make a 1000 cd's a week then a multiple drive system would probably be better.

[BKK-OZ]

I tried to duplicate myself working in conjunction with my ex-wife. In fact, I tried two times, but those damn kids came out as fully fledged people in their own right and I can tell you, they are not my duplicates!

Seriously, if you are doing more than 50-100, go to a dupe house, its cheap, fast and easy. Less than that, unless its a daily part of your business, I don't think the dupers are worth it.

I did a calculation of it all a while back and I reckoned that unless I had to make 20-30+ a day pretty much all the time, it just wasn't worth it.

The prices may have dropped since then, but I would think that the same argument would apply now.

[wonder]

i need a good short run place but even equally important, a place that prints GREAT artwork quality!

any suggestions?

[BKK-OZ]

sorry matey, I'm in Oz.

Forgot to mention in my last post that I just recently put a Lightscribe drive in my G5 - I am yet to run off any discs, but for small quantities I think its pretty cool technology.

[JackMaverik]

Hey man,

How short run? Under 500?

The best place in the universe is www.builtbyicon.com.

Amazing company, retardedly awesome pricing, brilliant artwork, and they'll do just about anything for you to make you happy.

Scope it. Tell em Jack Maverik sent ya.

[MT]

Originally posted by BKK-OZ:
Forgot to mention in my last post that I just recently put a Lightscribe drive in my G5 - I am yet to run off any discs, but for small quantities I think its pretty cool technology.

Just an FYI, since the topic's about duplication:

Lightscribe is very cool, but not ready for primetime. I bought two of the LaCie external Lightscribe CD-RW/DVD+RW drives for a sampler I shipped/handed out last week. After 89 copies, they both bombed out to where one would only scribe a swirling pattern like a lollipop, and the other would scribe 75% of the disc and then error out.

The results look really cool, and it's great to not have to buy cartridges or ribbons, but at 30 minutes per CD (28:49 for my label), you have to run them all day long (~15 hours per day in my case) and these particular drives can't take it. I'm pretty sure HP makes them for LaCie, so I returned them instead of trying HP's model.

They did continue to burn the audio portion of the disc OK after the design failures.

MT

[BKK-OZ]

Well I hope I don't have the same problems.

I don't have intentions of running off that many discs with them, but its pretty dissapointing that they can't handle a bit of work. 89 discs isn't too many, is it?

I had not heard about those problems from other users, maybe you were just extra unlucky.

[MT]

89's nothing! I was very disappointed, because they look really cool and it's great not having to buy cartridges.

It's possible I'm very unlucky, but two different drives (same brand) from two different stores... who knows?

At 30 minutes per disc, I'm sure I won't be the only one who tries this and possibly has problems, so maybe we'll hear more down the line.

MT

<small>[ August 22, 2005, 09:24 AM: Message edited by: MT ]</small>

[newrigel]

Originally posted by BKK-OZ:
Forgot to mention in my last post that I just recently put a Lightscribe drive in my G5 - I am yet to run off any discs, but for small quantities I think its pretty cool technology.

Just an FYI, since the topic's about duplication:

Lightscribe is very cool, but not ready for primetime. I bought two of the LaCie external Lightscribe CD-RW/DVD+RW drives for a sampler I shipped/handed out last week. After 89 copies, they both bombed out to where one would only scribe a swirling pattern like a lollipop, and the other would scribe 75% of the disc and then error out.

The results look really cool, and it's great to not have to buy cartridges or ribbons, but at 30 minutes per CD (28:49 for my label), you have to run them all day long (~15 hours per day in my case) and these particular drives can't take it. I'm pretty sure HP makes them for LaCie, so I returned them instead of trying HP's model.

They did continue to burn the audio portion of the disc OK after the design failures.

MT

Thanks for that info! I just bought one myself and I just did some real custom one-offs (special editions) but how many did you print before it took a dump... 89? Thats too bad they don't have any type of lifespan! But for dups thier WAY T O O S L O W!

[Jim]

I bought a LightScribe burner, but haven't used it for printing yet. I was disallusioned to find out that the printing is monochromatic, and the print times are outrageously slow. But, the LaCie is great otherwise, as it does dual-layer burning and very fast burns (48x) on CDs and DVDs (8x).

Since a dual-layer DVD only burns at 2x, and media is expensive, backing up to single layer DVD media at 4-8X is the way to go for me... obviously I'm talking about backing up projects here, not duping audio CDs.