In January I wrote about installing a $35 OEM dual-layer, Lightscribe DVD burner in a $30 Firewire/USB case. Since then I’ve been playing with Lightscribe CDs and I must say, I like the technology. It isn’t perfect, but for the extra $5 it cost to get a Lightscribe burner, it is a worthwhile tool.
What is it?
Lightscribe uses a burner’s laser to create monochrome images and text on the surface of a a specially coated CD or DVD. The background is light and the scribed area is darker.
How does it work?
The coating darkens where the laser toasts it. You put the disk in upside down so the laser can reach it, and then flip it over to read or write the disk.
What is it good for?
Labeling disks with optional decorative flourishes. I burn music CDs from iTunes for car use, and the hastily scribbled “Favorite Rock” isn’t much information 3 months later. With Lightscribe it is easy to burn the playlist on the disk.
Lightscribe quality
Given a print engine of over 2.4 billion dpi, you’d expect pretty high resolution. And indeed the resolution is excellent.
Yet there are two problems with Lightscribe quality: the printing is monochrome; and the contrast is limited. So while the detail is there, it doesn’t leap of the disk at you.
Burn time?
For some reason it takes 10-20 minutes to scribe a disk, which is a little odd when you consider that you can burn 700 MB of data faster than you print a 100 KB bitmap. You can cut the time by scribing smaller areas of the disk as you might for labeling backups.
Software?
There is free software for PCs, Macs and Linux available on the web, including an open-source labeler and a product from LaCie. For Linux and Mac OS I recommend the LaCie product because it has a reasonable number of designs to choose from and is fairly flexible. The software worked fine with my homebrew burner. Play with it though: it took me a while to figure out how to get a long playlist on disk using the LaCie software.
Kudos to LaCie for making the software freely available. They get a nice big LaCie logo on my desk when I use it, which must be worth something.
A quick scan suggests that most commercial disk labeling packages also support Lightscribe.
Playing catch the iTunes playlist
iTunes doesn’t make it easy to get an editable playlist. You can export a playlist, but it includes much junk, like file paths. The workaround I found: select the playlist; go to Print Setup; select an all text design; select Print; then Print Preview. Select the preview’s text, copy, and paste into the label creation software.
Hey, Apple, how about a cleaner way to get an editable playlist?
Lightscribe vs printable media
Color inkjets can produce very nice labels and the media is a little cheaper than Lightscribe. I did see a report of a printed disk that delaminated in an optical drive, destroying it, which seems to be an uncommon experience. Lightscribe disks are coated, so I wouldn’t expect that to be a problem.
On the other hand, once you’ve bought the disk, you don’t have to pay for ink or wrestle with carriers or what-have-you to get the disk printed. The total cost of ownership is probably similar once ink coat is factored in.
The StorageMojo take
I’m hell on my car CDs, so I’m not totally sold on paying the extra money for Lightscribe media, but maybe you are more careful than I am. I definitely like being able to see a playlist on the disk. Since I use a laser printer, inkjet printable media isn’t all that attractive.
The sweet spot for Lightscribe, IMHO, is low-volume back up media. You can label each disk with a fair amount of detail and file it. When restore time comes, you don’t have to guess what you’ve got. That is worth something in peace-of-mind.
Comments welcome, of course. How do you label your backup media? Other insights into labeling media, inkject media printing or ???
I used to build and overclock my own PCs throughout the late 80s, and the 90s.
Partly because I did a lot of 3D modeling and animation back then, so shaving minutes or hours off of individual frame rendering was a huge deal. I’m talking back in the days before Pixar began animating desk lamps and snow globes.
These days I’m no longer an early adopter of new technology. I read about it. I write about it. I may even dream about it. But I don’t immediately invest in it, not for myself anyway. There is simply no point. Memory is fast enough, processors are fast enough, and media is reliable enough that I just don’t waste precious budget on things that are not absolutely necessary.
Instead, I like to let new technologies and gadgetry simmer in the marketplace to let the flavors mingle like the ingredients of a good soup. If after a few years of slowcooking the products have held their appeal, I pick them up for pennies on the dollar and spice up the stuff I have at home.
Whenever I want to tesdrive a new technology, I buy it as a gift for others. People that do not have my built-in bias. This time around, I bought Lightscribe drives as gifts for teens and tweens in the family. I figured, they love that sort of stuff. And for the first couple of weeks they thought Lightscribe was cool. Then it was cumbersome. Then it wasn’t used at all. These days they use Sharpies to mark their CDs and DVDs, just as they did before the Lightscribes. They tell me it’s easier, faster and just as effective. And they’re right.
I don’t see a Lightscribe in my future.
I’d love to know what kind of personal computer you were “overclocking” before 1986, and rendered on.
Luxo Junior was released in 1986, and at that time, a 4.77 MHz 8088 was the norm. Luxo Jr was rendered on many dedicated AMD bit-slice 2900-series processors.
Your post reeks of BS.
In the 80’s the main computer for 3D (aside from expensive SGI gear) was an Amiga, especially once Newtek brought out the toaster. IIRC it had 3d software available from the get-go, which still puts it in 1985. Before that it’d have been a C64, maybe. And yes, people used to soup up their Amigas by replacing the main CPU with a ~10MHz version (instead of the 7.14MHz version that they shipped with).
For what it’s worth, you can also get a simple song listing by changing the iTunes view options to only have the data you want, then Select All->Copy. This gets you a tab-delineated list of whatever is in the playlist.
Nick, you’re too literal and you’re splitting hairs. I specifically wrote the “late 80s and early 90s”, not 1986. My facetious comment about Pixar was meant to give readers not familiar with animation some idea of the timeframe (i.e. the very early days of computer animation). I’m well aware that Luxo Jr appeared in 86 and Knick Knack in 89.
Damien is correct that the history of overclocking personal computers is nearly as old as the PC itself. While I did hack the early Commodore 64 games to create my own, and I built all of my own PCs, I did not begin overclocking hardware until I could afford it in the early 90s, when I began OCing on the x86 platform to speed up rendering. I quit hotrodding my PCs around 2001, and I built my last server (which is still in operation today as DMG’s main hardware) in 2003.
As for 3D modeling, I made do with what was available at the time. I began with DKBTrace on the Amiga around 86 (later ported to PC), and Hash’s Animation Apprentice. DKBTrace eventually evolved into the POV-Ray project – an outstanding program of which I am still very fond. And Apprentice gave way to Journeyman, and eventually, Animation Master (PC and Mac), another excellent and affordable animation application. From there I jumped into early Caligari and eventually Truespace 1.0 around 94 (through release 3.0). The last two licenses I purchased were for Poser and Bryce which I never really had a chance to fully explore. I left the modeling and animating hobby in early 2001.
I should also mention that I did learn enough on Lightwave and Studio Max in the 90s to be dangerous…but both applications were way out of my budget and only accessible through employers and colleagues in the industry. I discovered that these mid-tier applications were not substantially better than the more affordable entry level applications I had been using for years.
I have no experience with high-end apps such as Wavefront and SoftImage.
All that to say, for the sake of chronological accuracy, no, I was not overclocking PCs back before Luxo Jr. Fortunately that detail was irrelevant to the point of my post.