What is LightScribe?
LightScribe in its simplest explanation is a new technology that Hewlett-Packard announced for home users to professionally label their burnt optical media.
The idea is that you buy a CD or DVD burner that supports this technology. Then to purchase optical media such as CD’s or DVD’s that are specially coated on the non-data side to work with the LightScribe drives.
You simply burn data onto your disc(s), eject it and flip the disc over. Once you have installed the special LightScribe application, you can start burning a "silkscreen quality" image of your choice onto the disc.
The reason behind this technology is offer better quality labels that can’t come unglued or have ink that may penetrate media and damage the data on them.
The images at the moment are in monochrome, but a full colour version is in the pipe line.
The time that it takes varies from 2 minutes for a simple text label, onto 20 minutes for a label with lots of graphics.
The printing can take place in the background. Obviously you won’t be able to do anything else with the drive until the labelling is complete.
LightScribe discs have a unique code which allows the drive to determine the dimensions of the disc and accurately apply the image.
USB drives can have huge capacities so they are hardly rendered obsolete:s the are 64Gb USB drives out there and they go probably go higher still. nice article always wondered what this lightscribe thing was, my drive cost about £8 and its got it, according to the front bezel. Thats hardly expensive. surely it would be much easier to email digital assignments anyway rather than fart around with preparing the media, burning, finishing the disc etc.?
Recent opinions are that “normal” DVDs are dead; replaced by Bluray DVDs. My students are given SD cards (16 MB). Not sure how to bulk buy low cost USB flash drives.
Backups are now USB2-HDDs – faster & cheaper. May try eSATA HDDs for increased speeds. Micro-backups still use CDs and DVDs.
Lightscribe media isn’t double cost in the UK. It’s just slightly higher than DVD+R’s at Ryman. The hardware is accessible and cheap now. I’m wondering how recent your hardware is.
Burning DVD’s and CD’s isn’t a dying art. In industry it is the only way to go. At university we turn our digital assignments in on DVD. Lightscribe is practically a requirement for a professional image. In the entertainment industry, what would we do without digital resumés? Do you really think artists and vis fx programmers will be hired turning in a usb pen drive to a prospective employer? USB sticks are easily eclipsed by other portable media that can store much more. Just look at the various types of memory cards out there. 16gb SD for £16 at Amazon -I find that renders usb sticks obsolete. My new pc came with a cheapo 33-in-1 card reader. My new multi-DVD burner (includes DL)has Lightscribe and only cost £33. Don’t be so ignorant. These sound like experiences from ground-level users without much use for DVD labels anyway back in 2006. You’re way behind the times!
I quite like Lightscribe, and hence have it in 2 out of my 3 computers. Its not that I use it all the time, because I hardly do (but lets face it – burning cd’s and dvd’d is a dying art. most are happy to use usb sticks, media servers etc etc). Fact is though that you can buy a Lightscribe drive for only a few dollars more then one that isn’t a lightscribe drive. Sounds like a handy feature for not much dough!
Indeed, it would be nice if it was an unsupervised way of burning and labelling but who knows what the future holds?
Andy
I like the concept of the Lightscribe. But I have one problem with it for what I wanted to do. I wanted to do a number of “one off” burns of some reports at work. I thought it would be nice to have a Lightscribe to automatically label the CDs with a title along with the date and time. Unfortunately, you must “flip” the CD over in order to inscribe the label. I guess what I need is either a burner which can burn on either side, or an automated CD flipper.
Lightscribe is a waste of time.
Lightscribe discs cost double the price of a normal pack.
And the time taken for anything detailed is a joke.
Plus most people don’t have a lightscribe optical drive, so that means paying for that aswell.
So not cost effective considering the times of today and the recession and all.