Duplicators have become quite popular in the past few years, especially among those who have to produce product catalogs or company presentations on CD or DVD media. And while with most duplicators available, producing a few hundred discs was a breeze, now with the Acard ARS-2003N 1-to-21 duplicator, even thousands can be made short work of.

The Acard ARS-2003N 1-to-21 duplicator has a complete function set, controlled from a very simple front panel. The 1-to-21 burner is in fact 3 ARS-2003N boards connected together, each handling up to 7 burner drives. One controller is designated the host and it controls all functions. It can read the image to burn, from either a DVD-ROM drive or a HDD connected to the controller. We recommend using the HDD, except for very small jobs.

In our run of various tests, we met with no problems and found the controller to be very stable and reliable. We even made a run using as burners, different model drives (but from the same manufacturer), something which is not recommended by ACARD or any duplicator manufacturer. The unit however, worked without a hitch.

We burnt both CD and DVD compilations, around 500 discs in total. We had no failures or damaged discs. There were two occasions only where some discs were not written to, but the discs were simply used in the next round of writing.

If we have to complain about something, it would be the organisation of the menu, controlled from the front panel. There is a total of 13 main categories or functions. Some of these have sub-functions while others do not. In the case of the Setup and Advanced Setup main functions, there is a total of 38 sub-functions. We feel that this is too many and that they can be split into fewer selections under more main functions and into more logical groupings. The main functions Test, Test & Verify, Verify, and Compare, could then be grouped together under one main function to keep the number of main functions small.

Overall however, this is a very impressive duplicator. For pricing, contact one of ACARD's distributors.