HP LightScribe External DVD Burner
October 2005
No More Peeling Labels
If you've got a lot of music and pictures on your PC, then you probably like making CD and DVD copies of them. LightScribe is a technology that lets you personalize those CDs and DVDs beyond merely slapping a sticky label on them. Label stickers can be difficult to align, plus they wear over time, tear and sometimes even get stuck in your player—particularly the slot-type drives found in car CD players. With a LightScribe drive, your drive actually writes your design and title on the top of the disc itself—not on a label you stick on the disc.
It works by incorporating an additional laser that burns your design onto the label side of a disc by creating a chemical change in the disc's dye coating. The caveat is that it only works on special discs created with the specific coating that the drive works with.
The HP drive we tried is an external model, but internal drives are also available. Installation of the hardware and software was pretty standard. I connected the drive via a USB 2.0 cable, though it also accepts a Firewire cable. It comes with a number of software applications for creating audio and data CDs as well as basic video editing too. You also have to separately install the LightScribe labeling application.
Burning your data and burning the label are separate processes. Once you've put the data (music, video, pictures...) onto your disc, you then need to open the labeling application, remove your disc, turn it upside down and put it back into the drive. The label creator offers a number of templates for discs if you're not very creative on your own (I used the "flaming disc" template for one of my MP3 discs) you can also import images, album covers and even track lists and put them on the label. The software came with a small collection of clip art as well. You can add text onto the label and change the font, size and other attributes. For a collection of vacation pictures, I imported one of my pictures to use on the cover, added a text description ("Beach Vacation 2005"), then told it to print. Printing the label on the DVD can take a while. One disc took about 30 minutes to make.
The final results are pretty good. The image won't be in color—the discs are a sort of metallic olive/bronze, and your image is written in shades of that color. The labels can fade under some circumstances (long exposure to direct sunlight for instance) but they're a lot sturdier than any paper label. The images I burned onto CDs actually looked a little sharper than the same image burned on a DVD, and I learned that's due to the composition of DVDs themselves and not a flaw of the drive's writer technology—it's just the way it is.
If you've got a lot of music and pictures on your PC, then you probably like making CD and DVD copies of them. LightScribe is a technology that lets you personalize those CDs and DVDs beyond merely slapping a sticky label on them. Label stickers can be difficult to align, plus they wear over time, tear and sometimes even get stuck in your player—particularly the slot-type drives found in car CD players. With a LightScribe drive, your drive actually writes your design and title on the top of the disc itself—not on a label you stick on the disc.
It works by incorporating an additional laser that burns your design onto the label side of a disc by creating a chemical change in the disc's dye coating. The caveat is that it only works on special discs created with the specific coating that the drive works with.
The HP drive we tried is an external model, but internal drives are also available. Installation of the hardware and software was pretty standard. I connected the drive via a USB 2.0 cable, though it also accepts a Firewire cable. It comes with a number of software applications for creating audio and data CDs as well as basic video editing too. You also have to separately install the LightScribe labeling application.
Burning your data and burning the label are separate processes. Once you've put the data (music, video, pictures...) onto your disc, you then need to open the labeling application, remove your disc, turn it upside down and put it back into the drive. The label creator offers a number of templates for discs if you're not very creative on your own (I used the "flaming disc" template for one of my MP3 discs) you can also import images, album covers and even track lists and put them on the label. The software came with a small collection of clip art as well. You can add text onto the label and change the font, size and other attributes. For a collection of vacation pictures, I imported one of my pictures to use on the cover, added a text description ("Beach Vacation 2005"), then told it to print. Printing the label on the DVD can take a while. One disc took about 30 minutes to make.
The final results are pretty good. The image won't be in color—the discs are a sort of metallic olive/bronze, and your image is written in shades of that color. The labels can fade under some circumstances (long exposure to direct sunlight for instance) but they're a lot sturdier than any paper label. The images I burned onto CDs actually looked a little sharper than the same image burned on a DVD, and I learned that's due to the composition of DVDs themselves and not a flaw of the drive's writer technology—it's just the way it is.
Companies Mentioned:
 |
