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.
