I have ordered the Microboard QDL-1000 DVD duplicator. It holds 25 blank disks and individually copies one by one unattended. Anyone have experience with this machine? In making a short run with my normal burner, I experienced about a 10% to 20% failure rate. As if that were not bad enough, I did not know which were the bad ones. My wife and I looked individually at 30 or so (fast forwarding it takes about 3 minutes each). These will be for sale, so 0 % failure is a requirement (or at least notify of bad ones). I am using highhest quality disks (Taiyo Yuden).
Thanks in advance
Dave Gurtcheff
Beach Haven, NJ
P>S I will also post in Computer and periphals forum

I would say that your normal burner is the problem. I have about a 0.1% failure rate with high grade discs.

Personally I would have just paid a professional duplicator. My last job needed 200 DVD's with printed disks, inserts and clear plastic covers. Each complete DVD cost something along the lines of $1.50 AU (including postage).

Hardly worth me ever bothering about it, I just supplied one original disk and the required graphics.

I've been using a Microboards Premiere Pro 1016 unit for about 3 years. It has (10) DVD burners. It makes very quick work of my small duplication jobs which average 100-200 discs per batch. I normally watch TV or work on other projects while duplicating and simply slap in another set of blanks when the drawers open. I normally use Verbatim or Maxell media. I also duplicate a fair number of CDs.

I set the burner to perform a read-verify after each write. In two years and several thousand dupes I've only had a handful of rejects.

The duplicator was around $900 but it has given me many hours of my life back and greatly reduced stress. I used to fire-up two to three desktops and a laptop or so for duplication runs. UGH.

gurtch wrote:
I experienced about a 10% to 20% failure rate.

What brand of media were you using and was it recommended by the manufacturer of the copier? Not all DVD writable media is created equal. And in my experience some manfucturers equipment tends to work better with a particular brand of DVD media.

You might want to check out this post, and PM Hammy to see why he choose the tower he did.

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/768502/0

+1 for double checking your media. I had a Bravo DVD Duplicator a while back and found that it was picky and more of a hassle than it was worth. It only liked DVD-R from Verbatim. Anything else was hit and miss.

I started off with a Bravo duplicator: 25-50 discs at a time. The software (PrimoDVD) would tell me if I had a bad disc.
I quickly outgrew that model and got a ComposerMAX from the same company. This model has 4 drives and printer which handles 400 discs at a time. Luckily it uses the same software and told me about bad burns, but after burning 2000 discs a week for a while, I've had to replace the printer, drives twice, rebuild the robotic arm and one problem for a while I had - that tech support could not figure out after having difficulty burning discs, was the power supply - had to replace that.

When it was down for a while, I went to a tower duplicator. More manual process, but faster covering 10 discs at a time. Since I had the volume to get pre-printed discs, this made sense. The controller onboard tells me about bad discs by not ejecting them when the job was done.

BTW - the whole time, I've been using Ty discs (Taiyo Yuden). Used Ridata once and had burrs on the edges and they stuck together too much.

So now I have 36 towers with 11 bays each - daisy chainable together to burn 10-395 copies at a time. The biggest problem that I believe I've come up against with this many burners is again power. To burn 43 discs with 4 towers connected, the whole process pulls nearly 13 amps when all the drives are spinning/writing. Without clean power, I experienced more issues than before on the day we had to burn 14,000 discs. Once I got to independent outlets - each delivering 15-20 amps, we had a much smoother time.
However, there is still a 'common' failure rate of about 1-2 discs out of 43. When I run smaller runs of towers/discs, I get less failures, so I am looking into line stabilizers to give me clean power when I'm pushing the limit of the circuit.

I don't know if any of this helps Dave's original problem - but hopefully it'll give you some ideas to look at.

Hammy.