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Media Production
Service-Oriented Disc Duplication at Penn State
11/29/2007
When a student comes in to buy a program, store personnel check the student ID to make sure "we're not going to violate any contracts by selling to you," said Badger. "We used to send the materials out to be duped, but if we did it ourselves, there was a significant cost savings."
Badger said the school is evaluating digital download possibilities, but "right now that's tough to manage.... No matter how well secured they are, they'll get broken into."
Duplication OperationsA dedicated person works the duplication equipment, which currently consists of four Rimage Producer duplicators, two for CDs and two for DVDs. Badger estimated that the systems run about $50,000 for each setup. (The company quotes educational pricing on its Producer 8100N at $39,950 and the Producer 7100N at $24,950.) The newer machines include four disc burners and can crank out 200 DVDs an hour; CD duplication goes faster than that. The cost of the media--including a blank disc and printing costs--run between $0.25 and $0.30 for DVDs and $0.10 and $0.15 for CDs. In late 2006, the company began offering a version of its systems that allows network users to access the equipment.
Badger said midrange devices such as the Rimage typically attach to ordinary desktop computers or have a computer built into the system to feed the image to the particular media. (The company released a network-enabled version of the Producer in 2006.) Plus, they have some type of robotic arm and a tray at the bottom with blank discs. An arm picks the disc up; the burner does its job; and the arm picks replaces the disc into the finished tray. A thermal printer imprints a color or monochrome label onto the disc.
"There's some human interaction because you have to load and unload the trays," said Badger. "And you have to sit there and click around on the screen and tell it what you want to burn and how many copies you want."
The school chose--and continues to choose--Rimage equipment for two reasons: price and service. But a major consideration was also space. "Their systems fit into the space that we had available. That helped us make our decision." The computer for each unit sits under the desk, and the tower with the robotic arm sits on top. The Producer 8100N is between 29 inches and 35 inches high, 17 inches wide and between 25 inches and 29 inches deep. It weighs about 100 pounds.
Customer Support
Badger is circumspect about the reliability of the machines. "They're a piece of technology," he said, "and sometimes technology breaks down."
That includes problems with the printers because the graphic isn't formatted to fit on a donut-shaped space. Sometimes the disc images don't want to burn because there's an error in one of the image files. Other times the CD or DVD blanks have a bit of bend to them--undetectable to the naked eye, but still unable to be burned by the machine since they don't fit right. Sometimes, said Badger, the burners--"just standard CD and DVD burners that you could buy at any good quality electronics store"--just break, and they need replacing.
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