This duplicator is similar in appearance to the -R duplicator I reviewed last year

It has 7 RICOH MP5125A PLUS R writers and 1 16x BTC. BDV 316C DVD-ROM Drive



It was supplied without a hard drive, so for my tests I fitted a 20 gig hard drive in place of one of the RICOH drives. I first did some copies to Datawrite DVD+R media but found the quality of the burns to be poor, I checked the firmware to the drives and found there was an upgrade available and I temporally placed each RICOH drive in a PC and upgraded the firmware to 1.51 checking the quality of the burns again found them to be almost perfect.

Copying a full 4.47 gig movie on the fly to 6 DVD+R discs took less than 1/2 hour I used a mixture of 3 Datawrite and 3 Traxdata discs. I repeated this copy with fresh Datawrite & Traxdata discs swapped in the drives. The resultant scans with NERO CD SPEED were almost perfect with only minor imperfection with the Datawrite media shown up in my very fussy LITEON LTD163 DVD_ROM drive. These imperfections are not detrimental to the playback and reflect only on the cost of the media which is half that of the Traxdata.


I submitted my findings to Datawrite and have been informed that they are changing the specifications of the media to match that of Traxdata.

I checked playback of these discs and only found 2 of my players that would not play any DVD+R media they are the Panasonic DMR-E20 and the Toshiba SD-100E all the other players played all the discs flawlessly.

The Controller
On powering up the message "THE BEST DUPLICATOR" appears on the back-lit LCD display, this was followed by a device scan listing the drives in order with the model & firmware.

The display then shows the function selected with the number of copies/No of blank media/No of drives & source drive
The second row in the display indicates the source drive and type of disc followed by the size.

When the copying starts the second row changes to indicate the recording speed the % copied & the size of the file copied so far.

There are only 2 buttons on the controller SET & RUN these are all that are needed to use it.

The SET button changes the operating function and the RUN button starts it.

The SET functions are
COPY :- This will copy from the selected source (Hard Drive partition or DVD_ROM) to the writers, When there is no disc in the DVD-ROM reader and a usable source disc is inserted in any of the writers it will be selected indicating the drive number and file size and copying can be done from this drive by just pressing the RUN button, when a usable source disc is inserted in the selected source it automatically overrides this one
COMPARE :- This compares the source with the written discs
COPY & COMPARE :- This copies the disc then does a comparison of it with the original
VERIFY :- This does a verification of the burn
ERASE :- This will erase all DVD+RW media in the writers
LOAD :- This function is only available when there is a hard drive installed and loads the image of the disc in the selected DVD reader onto the hard drive into the selected partition
TEST :- This function runs a test burn without actually burning this is handy to see if the reader can keep up with the writer and that there are no read errors on the source disc
Once the function is set pressing the RUN button starts the appropriate function

Advanced set up options are accessed by pressing the set button and holding it in for a couple of seconds these settings are
SETUP
CHOOSE SOURCE :- This gives you the option to choose the source disc or drive for the copy, which is between 1 & 8 and Auto & is cycled by the RUN button
DISC COUNTER :- gives you the choice of how many copies are to be made between 1 & 8, Manual & Automatic the choice is again cycled by the RUN button, The copy process will start automatically when the desired number of writable discs are in the drives
SKIP READ ERROR:- ON or OFF This can be selected when there is a disc with errors to be copied on the fly and with a bit of luck there should be a usable copy
I tried this with a disc that would not begin to play in any DVD player and the resultant copy DVD played OK
My next test was with a disc that played badly towards the end of the burn the resultant disk played back without problems.

My next test was with a disc that failed to be read after 3gig the copy speed dropped on occasions from 23x to as little as 8x and I could hear the reader struggling to read the disc but the resultant movie played back flawless to the end
My final test with read errors was a disc that could not be read from 94% onwards and just locked up in any DVD players, whilst copying the copy speed dropped to 0x at this point and the writer drive lights went out at 4238 meg it continued to try and read the disc with the drive lights flickering momentarily whilst the discs are being written to (Thanks to the JustLink buffer underun protection) After a total of over 5 hours the copy was complete the resultant video played back OK up to the error point and continued to play to the end of the film with severe pixelation and interruptions in the audio. The skip error and JustLink had worked very well and this setup enables you to get the best possible copy out of a bad master

WRITING METHOD: - DAO or TAO, DAO is used for copying DVD movies
READING SPEED: - This can be set from 1x speed to maximum I preferred to leave this at 32x speed which refers to CD reading speed and is just over 3x DVD reading speed, too fast a reading speed can produce read errors
WRITING SPEED:- This can be set from 1x up to 40x and is indicated as CD speed and Maximum. I left this at max which for the RICOH is 2.4x DVD speed which gives the equivalent CD writing speed of 23x
SET AS DEFAULT:- This resets the controller to factory default which will be satisfactory for most users
UPDATE FIRMWARE:- This setting is for updating the firmware of the controller via a CD, the image for this will be available from the controller suppliers
PARTITION NAME:- This selects the partition to use on the hard drive for the disc image. 4 partitions are produced on a 20 gig hard drive. A, B, C & D

Well that's all the functions looked at. How easy is it to copy a disc?

I put six blanks in the drives and a disc to be copied in the reader and pressed GO less than 1/2 hour the finished discs were ejected and the display indicated 6 PASSED 0 FAILED and indeed I had six perfect copies. There isn't an option not to eject the discs after completion which I would have preferred.

Next I tried a copy to the hard drive and then burn copying to the hard drive took about 1/4 hour followed by the burn which was just under 1/2 hour. I personally prefer this method to make sure I have good copy in case there are any problems or read errors with the source disc. The SKIP READ ERROR function can always be used

I did some copying to DVD+RW media which also burned at 2.4x speed and the resultant burns were also playable in the same DVD players. However I was not able to use these RW burns as masters due to the fact that all the PC DVD-ROM drives I tried these discs in reported the disc size as 4.38gig irrespective of the file size on the discs, this also applied to the RICOH MP5125A drives.

I copied a DVD movie with a file size of 2,234 meg to a DVD+RW discs in the duplicator and then put one of the discs in the reader to copy again it reported the file size as being 4,482 meg but I continued to copy the disc which started fine but when it reached 4,474 meg the writing stopped and the drive continued in this state for over an hour when I canceled the burn. I checked the resultant disc and playback was fine until it reached the end of the film where it froze on the last frame.

So I have come to the conclusion that DVD+RW media is totally unsuitable for making DVD movie masters for direct Disc to Disc copying The files can however be copied to the hard drive and the title set then burnt with Record Now Max without any problems.

If any RW media is in any of the recorder drives it is automatically erased before the writing starts there is no warning!!

Conclusion
This is a no frills DVD+R Duplicator that does what it says on the box with simplicity and ease of use. The controller has all the required options for advanced usage and is simple enough for the beginner to use, but I doubt if a beginner would need to duplicate this many DVDs at once.
The +R format is as good as the -R format and it is has similar compatibilities. The only down side of the +R format at the present time is the cost of the media which is rapidly becoming more competitive.

The incompatibility of the +RW recordings for mastering is only a minor problem with this format but needs to be noted. There is not as much variety of +R than -R media and the +R media I did use produced excellent results The media I used was Datawrite and Traxdata.

Added:  Saturday, January 11, 2003
Reviewer:  Flash

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