The 9 Best DVD Duplicators

For a church, school office or small business that hands out discs every week, the PlexCopier 1-to-5 hits a sensible middle. Your master goes in the top drive, and five blanks burn at once with no computer attached. It handles DVDs, CDs and long-life M-Disc blanks, and PlexCopier backs its towers with a year of parts and labor plus free phone help. It has no hard drive, so the master is read again for every batch.

Labor coverage runs three years on the Produplicator 1-to-7, and phone help lasts as long as you own it. The tower spots the master's format by itself and can build a mixed music CD from tracks on several source discs. Seven blanks burn per pass, which suits weekly church services, training classes or a band's merch table. You pay a lot for a box of burners, and stock was down to a single unit when we checked.

Families copying wedding videos, or a band selling a few CDs at shows, rarely need more than the PlexCopier 1-to-1. It sits on a desk like a small computer case, and a little screen with a handful of buttons runs the whole job. It writes DVDs, CDs and archival M-Disc blanks, and PlexCopier backs it with a year of repairs and phone help for life. The catch is pace: you swap in a fresh blank for every single copy.

Groups that hand out dozens of discs at a time get a lot of burners for the money with the BestDuplicator 1-to-7. Seven blanks copy from one master per pass. A hard drive can be added later to hold masters, and with a USB cable your computer can use one of its burners as an external drive. BestDuplicator, a brand of Amamax, publishes little documentation, and the warranty covers a single year.

Anyone who reprints the same discs month after month should look at the Vinpower SharkCopier 3-Target. A big hard drive inside stores finished jobs, so a reorder starts without the original disc, and a USB link lets you send folders straight from a computer. For music CDs it can check every copy against the master, sound included. Three burners per pass is modest output for the money, and the model is too new to have a track record.

A school concert or a conference handout calls for big batches, and the BestDuplicator 1-to-11 burns eleven blanks at a time without breaking the budget. It reads the master's format on its own, and the menu uses plain Enter and Escape keys. This heavy tower needs a sturdy table and open space around its fans. The seller's page muddles in Blu-ray wording, so plan on DVDs and CDs.

Filmmakers who hand out high-definition copies have few standalone choices, and the PlexCopier Blu-ray 1-to-1 is one still sold new. Besides Blu-ray, it copies DVDs and CDs, and it can add a free copy guard to your own DVD videos when you use the special blanks it supports. It burns one disc at a time, and Blu-ray blanks cost more than DVDs, so long runs get slow and pricey.

Load a spindle of blanks and walk away: the PlexCopier PCX-1 MiniLoader feeds them one by one into its burner and counts the good copies. Its hard drive keeps masters for repeat jobs, and it can work through several different masters in one session if you stack them in order. With a single burner, a full spindle of DVDs takes the better part of a working day, and it hasn't built much of a track record yet.

Duplication shops and large churches that run hundreds of discs a week can lean on the Vinpower SharkCopier 11-Target. Eleven burners work from masters stored on a big internal drive, and a fast USB link brings in files from a computer without burning a master disc first. Vinpower publishes a full spec sheet and firmware updates. It's costly and heavy, needs its own sturdy spot, and few buyers have reported on it yet.