DVD copier scales to thousands

There's a new reason to fear the chief executive's annual pep-talk to the company – being sent away with a CD, or better yet a DVD, of the event so you can enjoy it again at home.

British company Verity Systems has come up with a relatively cheap way of copying up to 2,550 CDs or DVDs at once. At £732, its LinxTower contains a ROM drive for the master disc, ten DVD burners, and enough logic to copy from the former to the latter – and up to 255 of the units can be daisy-chained together.

The LinxTower also contains a 160GB hard disk which can be used to store master copies. It writes CDs at 48x and DVDs at 16x, enabling a full DVD to be copied in around seven minutes, and a CD in two and a half minutes, according to Verity's Audrey Crawford.

She added that devices of this type are already very popular with churches in the US, which use them to distribute copies of sermons after a service.

The snag when compared with the sort of auto-loading DVD burners used in industry is the need to load and unload discs manually. Of course, that's less of a problem in areas where labour is cheap – or where you have a supply of faithful acolytes to draw upon. ®