[ubuntu-uk] OT: Disc duplication - anyone know any places that can do it cheap?

[Rob Beard]

Mark Harrison wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-10-11 at 20:49 +0100, Rob Beard wrote:

> Rob,
> 
> As it happens, I was with a disk publisher today sorting out a new 
> audiobook series I've done for them.
> 
> Sadly, they don't do duplication for other people, just their own stuff, 
> but given I was getting the "factory tour" I spent a bit of time in the 
> "production room."
> 
> They have moved AWAY from the cheap disks, and moved onto the Sony ones...
> 
> ... because in the last million they produced on Sony media, 6 failed !
> 
> The break-point in producing glass masters seems to be around the 500 
> disk mark - beneath that, big robotic duplication machines that are 
> basically a stack of DVD-R drivers, a printer, and a robot arm to move 
> disks between them (about 6 drives per printer seems to be the balance 
> for speed purposes) are the way they go.
> 
> The biggest cost they were facing was full-colour printing, which 
> actually cost MORE than the disks themselves. They've, again, moved to a 
> high-end system that literally has 7 "ink wells" connected to the beast 
> by tubes that they literally refill from bottles live.
> 
> Oh, and the fancy machines also connected to a 4 Tb over Gb ethernet, so 
> they could just pick any image, enter the number they wanted produced, 
> and click "go".
> 
> I was, it must be admitted envious :-)
> 
> M.
> 

Nice, bet it was an interesting tour.  I tried doing a small run of 
Ubuntu & OpenCD discs for a local event, just doing 200 discs took ages. 
  It wasn't the burning itself that took a while but the swapping of 
discs, that was before printing.

If this project I'm working on goes off we'll need a few thousand discs 
I think.

Rob