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Edit Integrate Review — Reliant Digital Duplication Suite

Feb 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Tom Patrick McAuliffe

Duplicate DVDs and CDs easily and affordably.

DVD has become the fastest growing video format in history with well over half of U.S. households owning at least one DVD player, according to the Consumer Electronics Association's estimates. The cost of DVD players and recorders has never been lower.

It was only a matter of time before a company introduced an affordable DVD/CD duplication solution. Reliant Digital, a small Colorado company, has done just that with its Duplication Suite. Whether you need to duplicate a DVD of your demo reel, your band's new audio CD, or a training video on disc, the 8X DVD/CD Duplication Suite has you covered. Retailing for about $2,000, it will start paying for itself as soon as you offer digital duplication on your services rate card.

At the heart of the system is the Reliant Digital Production Line tower duplicator, which has an 8X-speed home drive and three target DVD/CD drives that are able to duplicate DVD-R, DVD±RWs, CD-R, CD-RW, and CD-G media. The 8X-speed certified media burns at a rate of three full DVDs every nine minutes. (Reliant has recently released a version that burns DVDs at 16X.) The system's 24X speed will burn three new CDs every four minutes. Pretty impressive, although it requires operator assistance to retrieve the copied media and restock the drives with fresh blank discs, which is not a difficult task to perform in the background, which I am doing as I write this.

I tested a DVD and an audio CD created with the Production Line tower on more than 25 of the latest players at name-brand outlet stores. The duplicated DVD and CD played in all but one player (a Toshiba). You can't beat that. Most playback problems occur with older players.

This is the epitome of a turnkey product. The Production Line three-drive 8X duplication tower is a rock-solid foundation.

The Reliant Digital Duplication Suite is not just a duplicator; another part of this product is the Bravo II Autoprinter made by Primera Corporation. This disc printer is 15 percent faster than the original Bravo and produces near-photo-resolution, four-color, inkjet-printed discs at 4800dpi, which currently is the highest in the industry, according to the manufacturer.

The simple setup consisted of loading the drivers and software via the included CD and hooking up the printer to the computer via a USB cable, so that the system could print labels directly on discs. There's something about seeing a DVD or CD with a professionally produced label that sets it apart. If you want to take your special-interest video or audio CD and make retail-ready discs, this is the route for you.

The included Primera SureThing disc label software is compatible with Windows PCs and Macs running OS X and allows creation of professional-looking disc labels in a snap. You can create your own or use the software's Smart Designs, with built-in templates. The discs look stellar, and there's no more lining up of stick-on disc labels.

Once I was set up, I took my master DVD and placed it into the home DVD drive of the tower, took three blank DVDs and placed them in the target recorder drives, and pushed record. It was really as simple as that. Making sure I used the same format of blank media as I used for the master disc, I duplicated a 60-minute video demo DVD of a musical act, an underwater footage DVD, and some music CDs, each with no problems.

My next step was to take a DVD and audio CD and copy the contents onto the Reliant unit's internal hard drive. This allowed me to push a button and duplicate directly from projects on the hard drive. This manual process can actually come in handy when a disc does not duplicate properly and isn't ejected from the drive. Using the internal hard drive for duplicating audio CDs, you can take different cuts from different CDs and make a new master CD to duplicate.

I love that the Production Line tower duplicator is so easy to use. At a glance the LCD tells me exactly what function it is performing. I also like that this is a standalone device that can be operated when the laptop is being used for something else. With an onboard hard drive installed, I can dupe without a DVD or CD master disc if I've transferred my project into the onboard drive. This is handy because I can have five or six projects on the drive ready for duplication.

Of course, full automation is ideal — when a robotic arm takes a blank CD and automatically replaces the recorded one. But I had two of those units from name-brand manufacturers on the bench for testing and experienced significant problems with dropped discs and system halts due to corrupted media. No doubt those automatic solutions work when tweaked. But I'm more of a hands-on type, and I find it a small price to pay to take the time to do a disc swap that will ensure disc reliability.

I also appreciated the company including 50 Production Line inkjet-printable DVD-Rs, which is Reliant Digital's own brand of highly reliable, hub-printable discs that are blank on top and ready for your artwork. These blank discs use Mitsubishi's Azo dye, which is an industry standard typically found in such name-brand discs as Verbatim. But I also used several Memorex, TDK, and Sony blank DVD-R and CD packages over the course of a week, and only two discs out of about 200 were rejected by the duplicator as not recordable.

Perhaps the best feature of all is that the company has recently lowered the price to $1,945. At that cost, a dedicated standalone disc duplicator is a smart purchase for everyone from the one-person video shop to large educational and government A/V departments.

With more videographers, audio producers, and 3D animators delivering their projects and demos on disc, this is a timely product. For the budget-minded, the Reliant Digital Duplication Suite offers one of the least expensive ways to mass produce hundreds of professional high-quality discs day in and day out, or for as long as the coffee holds out. It's an affordable, reliable system for creating full-color DVDs or CDs that are perfect clones of each other. It's also made in the U.S. Reliant Digital is running circles around bigger competitors with this Duplication Suite.

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BOTTOM LINE

Company: Reliant Digital
Denver; (877) 858-3837
www.reliantdigital.com

Product: Duplication Suite

Assets: 50 Reliant Production Line ink-jet-printable blank media discs are included; can burn three full DVDs every 9 minutes and three new CDs every 4 minutes; the Bravo II Autoprinter offers near-photo resolution; the Production Line tower duplicator is easy to use.

Caveats: Not fully automatic: operator must replace a recorded disc with a blank one.

Demographic: Anyone needing affordable DVD and CD duplication without a computer.
Price: $1,945

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Tom Patrick McAuliffe is a journalist, entertainer, and video creator living in Hawaii.

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