Disc Writers Now Print the Label Too

gardolas writes "Rippers and burners with an eye for design have a new way to smarten their image. Disc writers that can print images onto the label sides of the discs will hit the market next month. The LightScribe system has been developed by Verbatim and HP."

Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now they can nail you for reproducing copyrighted artwork on your CDs full of downloaded music...

Add another 20 years in the pokey...

Good for the hobbyist

[Bluesuperman]

Cool ... finally I can make pretty images for my Linux distro CD's !!! I think this will be good for the home user and hobbyist but not for professionals. Michael.

I can see this looking really dated, really fast

[dim5]

I can't watch TV for half an hour without seeing the snowboarding ad showing off LightScribe.

Sure, it's cool... the first time you see it. But it's all done in one sepia tone. I don't see how the technology could advance to include color using a CDR laser, so prepare to get all the monotone fun you can handle. As soon as a more useful idea for CD labelling comes along, no one will be impressed with LightScribe, and the people that couldn't wait to use it will be embarassed to, because it will have gone from looking "high tech" to very dated.

Kind of like my Casio wrist camera.

Re:That's a good idea

[superpulpsicle]

Don't celebrate yet. Last time I tried some cover printing on a CD over at a friend's house, it got permanently stuck in my CD player. Yep, it was the most expensive label I ever paid for.

Re:Needs a built in label scanner....

[renehollan]

Noooo...Need a standard to store the label data on the disk itself, somewhere...

/me smells patent.

Re:Obvious question, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not an ink-based system. It uses a laser (presumably the same one as for burning the data side of the disc) to etch a greyscale image onto the label side of the disc.

I used one of these machines during their beta test and it worked fairly well. The discs I was given were gold-ish in color, so the label looked sorta sepia-toned. One issue that I had was that it took much less time to burn the data side of the disc than the label if you chose a high-quality setting. The finished effect is similar to the frosted labels on ordinary CD-R's (such as the Memorex or Imation discs I have with me now).

Needs to be taken a bit further

[vadim_t]

It should be able to add something to an already labelled disk. Perhaps by printing a marker and reading it.

Here I have a set of shell scripts that make a list of files, do the backups, open the CD tray, pop up a dialog window, and burn the CD when I click "okay". All that would be needed to make it even better is to print a mark on it.

I'm thinking of something like burning a calendar on the CD, then being able to burn over it to indicate the day the backup was made.

Talk about weird timing

[Cassanova]

For some random bizzare reason I headed over to the HP site about an hour before this article was posted and spec'ed out their top of the line system with what I would have wanted (the pavilion series). I managed to reduce their recommended configuration (which was $1800+) to about 1000 (cut out the 3 year HP extended warranty among various other things). It was there that I was quitely dazzled by their "LightScribe" writer that they were giving as an upgrade.

Then I hit slashdot and see this article posted. Now thats what I call Extra-Slashdottery-Perception. ;-)

HP and Compaq already shipping....

[thracky]

I work at a large national electronics retailer and I can say that HP and Compaq are already shipping systems with Lightscribe enabled drives however we don't yet have the media to take advantage of that yet.

The Compaq SR1350NX and I *believe* that HP A820N both have the Lightscribe enabled drives, but I know only of the Compaq for sure.