Cons: Doesn't copy "all popular formats" as advertised, and has a few quirks/limitations.
The Bottom Line: For easy way to copy music cd's and camera memory sticks to cd, this duplicator will meet your needs. (But not for discerning customers with special needs.)
graphics_guy's Full Review: Alera Technologies (310105) CD-RW Burner
I'm an avid music-lover, and have about 1000+ store-bought cd's at home. I like to make my own "greatest-hit" cd's, which I use in my car(s) cd changers, and when I'm out DJ'ing car shows & such. My dinky ancient laptop pc has a very slow cd burner (4x on slow usb1 connection), so a fast cd duplicator could really save me some time :)
My previous duplicator:
A few years ago, I bought a 40x cd duplicator made by the "Digital Research" company. It claimed to support lots of kinds of cd's (they specifically listed 9 formats, including "Audio CD" right there on the box), but it very frequently produced bad cd's, and even when it produced a 'good' music cd, it wouldn't play in my Sony jambox, and several other cd players. I contacted their tech support, and they only said "hmm... it's hard to make high-speed duplicates of audio cd's. Maybe you could try it at a lower speed (and to do that I had to connect it to a computer)". Ok, so I had a $200 paper-weight with that "Digital Research" unit, and was not happy at all :\
So, I waited several years until high-speed duplicators had 'matured'... and bought this Aleratec 310305.
The decision criteria:
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When I checked around other duplicators, and most of the features and prices were comparable, but this one had the camera memory-stick reader, and would let me easily burn my pictures onto a cd -- this was what "clinched the deal", since I'm often taking pictures on-the-road (such as when I'm DJ'ing car shows) and want to give a copy of the pictures to someone. That, and I had a Circuit City gift certificate I needed to use, and CC carried this particular unit :)
The Good:
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The unit is pretty easy to use - you just put in a blank cd, and the cd (or memory card) you want to copy, and there's a couple of buttons and small screen on the top where you select from several intuitive choices, and click 'ok' - then a couple minutes later, you have a new cd. Also, you can copy several different memory sticks to one cd (I was even able to use the cd on my computer, between memory stick transfers - ie, there doesn't seem to be a need to 'finalize' the disk in this case. I always selected the 52x speed, and the unit auto-senses the max speed of your cdr's and drops down to that speed (nice feature, if you don't know the speed of your cd's :)
The Bad:
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- No cd text:
The advertisements (and even the box) say "supports all popular CD formats", but that is some much overblown sales hype. For example, I make my "greatest hits" audio cds using Easy CD Creator and put "cd text" on it so I can see the names of the songs/artists in my pioneer car cd changer, and pioneer pro-dj cd deck ... but the copies made with this duplicator only have the music, with no cd text.
- No cd+g karaoke cd's:
I sometimes DJ karaoke parties, and I was really hoping to be able to use this duplicator to make copies of my CD+G karaoke cd's (so I wouldn't have to carry my expensive originals on the road with me) - the duplicator copies the music, but not the +G (the graphics/words that show up on the tv screen when you play a karaoke cd). Once again, it doesn't seem to support "all popular formats".
- Camera mem-stick filenames limited to 8-characters:
I have several memory sticks that I keep collections of photos on, which I use in a digital picture frame as 'slideshows'. I have nice descriptive filenames for the jpeg's. I copied a few of these sticks onto a cd, and it converted my long names into 8-character 'dos' names.
I confirmed the above 3 problems with Aleratec tech support.
- Also, they need to label the cd drawers as "source" and "destination" - they are currently unlabeled, so you have to remember to put the blank cd in the top one.
- When emailing tech support, they ask you to include the model#, but the model number is not written anywhere on the box, or manual, or the actual unit (I had to look it up on the websites that were selling the drive).
- For my first 2 email questions, it took their tech support several days to respond.
- When you copy memory sticks onto a cd, it labels the cd as 'BACKUP_DISC' (I would rather it didn't give it a text label at all -- backup_disk confused me, and I thought it was a cd with my computer backups on it).
- The camera memory stick doesn't slide in smoothly - it kinda has a grating/crunching sound when you seat it.
- Seems kinda slow about copying memory sticks, and doesn't display the write speed as it's copying (when copying cd's it displays the write speed).
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I guess my only real complaint is that they have over-hyped it by claiming it supports "all popular formats", when it obviously doesn't :\
External Cd-rw Drive. Great For Direct, Pc-less Data Transfer, Multi-session Recording, Burning Memory Card Data To Cds, File Back-up, Cd Duplication....More at Target
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