Great Duplicator, but has a few downsides
By Christopher on 05/16/2011
For the most part, this duplicator is really wonderful!
It's quick, efficient, and does a good job...most of the time.
I have a series of "how to" DVD's that I sell, so I've noticed that this machine occasionally has its quirks.
1) When duplicating something, it will sometimes appear that the process has gone off without a hitch. However, after the customer watches a DVD, they will inform me that it's skipping in certain parts. I found out quickly that if one of the DVD copies from a certain run skips, they all do it, and in the exact same spots. Which means that if I've made 9 copies of the same disk, I now have to throw away what I thought were 9 good copies and re-duplicate them. The good news is though, that if one disk in a run works perfectly, they all do.
2) Occasionally, when running large volumes of DVD's, after the 30th copy or so (10 runs of the machine), everything after that the machine spits out as an error. At first, you'll think that it was just 3 bad DVD's, but then you put in 3 more and they don't copy either, so you try 3 more from a different pack of DVD's thinking that you might have a bad pack...the new ones don't work either. The good news here is that the fix for this issue seems to be unplugging the machine and just letting it sit for a few hours. After that, it seems to function correctly each time.
3) Despite what the instructions say, this machine can NOT copy CD's. I've tried dozens of different CD's on every copy and read speed that I can. The result...sometimes the CD's will play for 5 minutes, sometimes they'll play for the whole CD, but every 10 minutes or so, it will skip forward 2 minutes, so you miss out on something. Most of the time though, what ends up happening is that the CD just won't work at all, no matter how many CD players you put it into. So, if you're wanting to copy CD's as well as DVD's, you'll need a separate machine for that purpose.
Despite its drawbacks though, I'd highly recommend this DVD copier for the average user. It's a great price, and it does the job quite well most of the time.