December 21st, 2007

Going automation or going manual is the first question most consumers ask themselves before buying a duplicator. There are two primary motives for why a consumer would choose one over the other. Price and time. Lets take a look at what a CD duplicator autoloader has to offer verse what a CD duplicator tower has to offer.

Lets consider these factors in several examples below.

It’s fairly obvious a CD duplicator tower will be far less expensive because the components used to manufacture the product are lower cost and easier to obtain. However, the purchase price shouldn’t be the only factor when calculating the ‘cost’ of a product. A manual tower needs an operator for the duplication process. That is a cost. In addition there are opportunity costs.

For example, you have an employee running the manual duplicator tower, they get a phone call and pulled away from the machine. The call requires urgent attention as your best customer is on the line and needs your help with another matter. After the customer issue is resolved, your employee resumes the duplication job. Well, how long was your employee away from the duplicator? How many discs where not burned because no one was there to swap out the media? If your employee was gone for one hour, you missed the production cycle of [possibly] hundreds of CDs. Couple this scenario with a short deadline for CD production and you are now in big trouble. Missed deadlines, employee overtime expense etc.

However, since a CD manual duplicator tower is inexpensive this might be the best financial decision for a small business or start-up company. Along with a manual tower, is usually a manual CD printer. After all, what good is a duplicated CD without a printed label? Here is another cost of the manual tower, the manual printer. Here again, the operator dictates the production speed and time-line of a duplication job.

For a break down on printers, see our CD Printers article.

Now consider a bigger budget where the purchase of a CD automated duplicator is plausible. With the additional hardware involved in making a robotic duplicator you can expect machines to cost between two and four times that of a manual duplicator. However, the upfront cost buys you the benefit of an employee as well. Automated duplicators are turn-key solutions where the system loads the drives, burns the media, shuffles the discs to the printer, labels them and places the completed disc on an output spindle.

The clear benefit to an automated duplicator is the non-stop production cycle. The production process is only limited to the input spindle capacity holding the blank media. Automated systems come in a variety of sizes and configurations so there is a good chance an automated unit is within most customers price range.

The automated systems are slow and steady duplicators. With the extra time needed to automatically load and unload media, the production process does take a little longer. For those needed a quick-turn environment, it might be worth considering multiple towers and manual printers - but again you run into the problem of production is determined by the operator [and their expense].

The automated CD duplicators available today are very advanced. With large input spindles, ability to asynchronously burn media (drives work independent) along with support for smaller media sizes such as business card CDR and mini-round media not much is left out on what automated systems can do. In addition, most automated systems are network compatible making them centralized production stations for business organizations.

Given the above information it is clear the decision to go with manual CD duplicators or robotic, automated duplicators can be difficult. As a closing thought, many business start with a tower duplicator and grow into an automated system. Keeping the manual system as a back up duplicator for over-run or peak production times.