Duplication hardware doubles up in Asia

BACK-UP IS BIG business in Asia nowadays it would appear, judging by the multitudes of vendors who have been touting their duplicator hardware of late.

The INQ certainly raised a suspicious eyebrow when it saw the following offerings from Taiwanese firm ACARD, an "IC design and Storage" firm selling CD and DVD duplicators and copy controller cards that purportedly "support high speed duplication from 1 target , 3 target, 5 target , 7 target, 9 target and 21 targets." For banks and small businesses, obviously. *Cough!*

Fellow vendor UREACH has also been flashing about its duplicators, spanning all manner of "storage" offerings from DVD, Blu-ray, Flash and even HDDs. Its MD800 is even apparently one of the first DVD duplicators to perform flash to disc backup.

Ironically, the firm, with offices in Taipei, Hong Kong and mainland China, boasts its Video Lock DVD duplicator can protect discs from duplication. Hmmm. Mull on that one.

Commercial pirates - or should we say, people incredibly concerned with "storage and backup"? - must also be suffering from acute laziness, as we noticed firms like Vinpower offering robotic optical disc copiers with autoloading duplicator hardware.

Or perhaps the manual labour of relentlessly having to change discs is just getting too expensive? Sigh, yet more victims of the credit crunch. µ