LightScribe: remember that?

I'm 100% with you Alec. I liked LightScribe, too. I downloaded an add-on to my LightScribe software that actually doubled up on the image contrast - and of course the burn time. It made greyscale images far more useable, but it took almost an hour to burn a disk.

Stephen Bell

Or DVD-RAM, which always seemed the most interesting

kalleboo

Any thoughts is covering the DVD-R vs DVD+R and -RW and +RW formats?

lohphat

The label writing time is the main thing that put me off getting a LightScribe drive, especially with my current and previous two inkjet printers capable of printing discs. My current printer only takes about a minute, so if I want to write a longer label, I usually find it quicker to type it up and pop the disc in the printer's CD tray to print. Pity this was not the case for LightScribe or similar in-drive labelling.

Seán Byrne

Fantastic video! My dad only stopped using LightScribe in his business within the last few years. Part of his business involves creating one-off discs of digital versions of paper records to be sent to the government (who has upgraded from paper to... CDs and paper). His customers were always really impressed with the LightScribe discs. They really can give a disc a very professional look compared to paper labels (as long as you only need to make one or two). Oh, also one thing that may have contributed to LightScribe's almost-success would probably be that it was made by HP, who also makes a lot of low-end laptops, and would randomly throw lightscribe drives in for no extra money. That's how I (and probably a lot more people) first discovered LightScribe.

Is that center-ring pattern really a barcode, or is it perhaps an optical rotary encoder pattern? Obviously it can only be read when the laser is at the center, but running an optical rotary encoder pattern around a few times would let the drive calibrate itself timing-wise to be able to predict (once the laser is *off* the encoder pattern) where it will be based on time elapsed -- sort of dead-reckoning once the software is pretty sure it's dialed in and is in-sync with predicting when the next encoder pattern is going to come up. Further, I couldn't help but notice that several of the sample disks seemed to be slightly warped and wobbly themselves, and was wondering how much media sloppiness (vs. drive sloppiness) contributed to the precision defects in image reproduction. Thanks for the episode!

Travis Snoozy

I much preferred inkjet printable discs with an epson printer that could print on discs. Faster, looked better, etc. Light scribe always seemed like such a dumb idea.

Lennart Sorensen

I have a spare "rare bird" if you ever need it.

Jim Leonard

The Patreons list scrolls much slower. Why didn't it "work"?

Hank Lloyd Right

Released by HP. That is about all that is needed to understand why this failed.

Michael Steeves

I wanted to love LightScribe, but the lack of contrast and time it took to burn just made it tedious. I used the feature maybe a dozen times, then just Sharpied the discs instead. Only thing I noticed different was an arrow pointing directly at my name.

Quinton Wilson

Very nice video. I had a LightScribe drive but I never used it because LightScribe media was hard to find here in Italy.

Lorenzo Novara

Your last point hit home when you talked about cost. I had a lightscribe drive as a teenager, and I bought it because it was cheaper than the non-lightscribe Pioneer drive. I still have a spindle of some hundred lightscribe disks. However, I stopped labeling disks as a whole due to the time involved. To put the Ubuntu logo around the ring of a DVD, it took my first-gen drive over an hour to do. Personally, I loved it, and I wished they improved upon it somehow. I know optical media as a whole is somewhat dead, but I feel it could have been so much more.

avfusion

I didn’t notice anything but there may have been some other stuff I didn’t see............... ......................