Posted By Paul Kafasis on December 20th, 2004

Rogue Amoeba Software is pleased to introduce the newest member of our team – Clamps, the CD duplication robot. Clamps is a Primera Bravo II CD duplicator with a 50 disc capacity, a 52x drive, and a 4800 dpi inkjet printer. Basically, we have our own company robot, and really, who doesn’t like robots?

Say Hello To Clamps

We don’t plan to use the included printer unless necessary, as ink costs alone are between 60 and 75 cents per disc. Instead we’re having some blank CD-rs pre-printed with our artwork. Then when we’re ready to make some CDs, we just stick these in, burn, and drop them in a simple CD sleeve. The cost for this method about 70 cents a piece, so it winds up being cheaper and coming out better than local printing.

We’ll be using Clamps to make short runs of CDs for user group meetings. As well, we’ll eventually bring our sales process in-house, at which point it will make sense to mail out our own CDs. Currently, our payment processor sells CDs at an expensive $9.95 a pop. The software is always freely available for download, but some users prefer a hard copy and we sell an average of one CD per day or so. At $5 a disc we’d probably sell many more and be able to better serve those customers who want the discs.

We have other longer term plans for which Clamps will be helpful, and we can even use him to make larger runs (for things like Macworld) if we have a small amount of lead time. But most importantly, we’ll never again have waste in the form of leftover CDs that quickly go out of date. With the new duplicator, we can create anything we need on-demand, instead of using a pressing company and getting hurt by long lead times. That’s good for the company, good for the customers, and it’s even good for the environment, and there’s nothing wrong with that.