O'Dixion DG1-12X DigiCopier - Hardware Review - Evaluation

Emedia Professional, March, 2000 by Stephen F. Nathans

In 1978, I was eight years old and pretty easy to impress. I doubted if I'd ever grow as tall as my towering, 5'6" cousin Eli; I thought the Ideal Sundry at the corner of 9th Street and Pettigrew made the best lemonade on the planet; and I believed the suburban legend that Mark Hamill had made Star Wars in one day, and had lain down and died that evening. But in March of that year, I witnessed a remarkable feat that still leaves me awestruck to this day. I was watching my hometown team, Duke University, play for the national college basketball championship. Sometime in the second half, Duke's Kenny Dennard, a big, gawky hick from King, North Carolina, stole the ball, thundered downcourt, and--finding himself unguarded--leapt in the air and did a reverse dunk. The crowd went wild, and--as a wonderful series of black and white still photos in the next day's Durham Morning Herald revealed--no one looked more surprised than Dennard himself.

Reverse dunks just weren't the kind of things you expected from clumsy overgrown white guys--especially in those pre-showtime days, In other words, it wasn't just the feat itself that blew me away; it was who did it. Which isn't to say I wasn't a huge Kenny Dennard fan before The Dunk; I was, and remain one to this day, even though to my knowledge he hasn't picked up a basketball in 15 years.

Similarly, for four years now I've been among CD-R's most dedicated and vocal supporters, even though it's been known to be logy, is often unreliable, can heat up like a city bus in heavy traffic, and has traditionally comported itself with all the grace and agility of a rhino with lactic acid build-up. But in the last 18 months, I've seen CD-R accomplish feats I would have once thought a country-mile beyond its ken. Most recently, thanks to O'Dixion--a French company still relatively unfamiliar to the American CD-R market--and its compact, Sanyo-based 12X DigiCopier, mine eyes have seen the glory of true 12X CD duplication, a hitherto unimaginable delight.

operation

At its simplest, the O'Dixion DigiCopier could be said to offer "no-touch" duplication. Switch on the unit, insert a source disc and a blank CD-R or CD-RW, and the DigiCopier will select a speed and start copying all by itself. This is not always the best course of action, of course, or applicable to all functions, and the DigiCopier is designed to give the user some measure of choice in how to use it.

The LCD is about three inches wide and a half-inch high, and accommodates two lines of text to indicate status, operation, and selected function. Function selection is determined by pressing the five membrane keys fanned out below the display. The first four keys can be set ON or OFF: these include Simul (for simulated recording to test copying speed for reliability); Copy; Verif (for disc verification, data only--i.e., not audio); and Fit (for truncating audio discs running over 74 minutes). A fifth key, Speed, has six possible settings: Auto (duplicator-determined after scanning the disc for optimal speed), Safe (slow and sure for sketchy source discs), 2X, 4X, 8X, and 12X. The unit can also erase CD-RW media for re-recording. This is achieved by pressing Simul and Copy simultaneously, and only works when the read drive is empty. (The duplicator assumes a copying function is desired if the read drive is occupied, and returns a "Copy failed" error.)

This range of functionality does add versatility to DigiCopier operation, and the "Auto" function certainly makes things easy, but there's a downside: if Copy is set to "ON" (the default setting when you power up the unit), as soon as you insert your read and write discs, the DigiCopier will start copying, whether you're done with your settings or not, and the settings cannot be changed once the recording preliminaries begin.

In testing, the unit demonstrated facility with all its promised functions. It handles 2X, 4X, 8X, and dazzling 12X recording with equal ease, and even recorded a CD-RW disc at industry-standard 4X. And 12X recording was successfully achieved on multiple tries, and clocked for a 73-minute, 58-second audio disc at a blazing 6:39.

Watching the unit erase a CD-RW disc won't exactly give you whiplash, but that's par for the course with CD-RW. After copying the OEM version of Nero Burning ROM included with the duplicator at a rock-steady 4X, the DigiCopier took 39:50 to erase it before successfully writing it again.

The drive also performed effectively as an external SCSI PC drive using the Nero software [See Joshua McDaniel's review, February 2000, pp. 65-67--Ed.]. It should work just as well on the Mac when used with Toast 4 [See review, pp. 65-67 of this issue--Ed.] after appropriate drivers become available (as of this writing, they're not). Both the onboard TEAC 532S 32X CD-ROM drive (with 512KB cache) and the 12X/4X/32X Sanyo CD-RW drive can be configured as external SCSI devices, given available addresses 4 and 5. The recorder also includes a mighty on-board 4MB data buffer to ward off buffer underruns, which might be a heightened concern when attempting the higher recording speed with slower hard drives. The duplicator does not come with SCSI cables or card, so these must be purchased separately if users want to deploy the unit as a blazing external recorder.