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New HP Drive Lets You Burn Your Own Label
way2trivial writes "Wow -- remember Yamaha's DiscT@2? now HP has a invention to use the DVD laser to etch the flip side of CDs and DVDs. I own a nice Epson to print on CD-R/DVD-Rs, it does full color -- but this looks impressive as hell, even if it is in monochrome"
Have to wonder if this process will shorten the life of the cd the way adhesive labels are rumoured to do...
This is a great idea - granted, it takes special media (which sounds like it's just basically double-sided), but if it gets popular enough, it should be cheap and easy to find.
Although I like colour inkjet printable CDs/DVDs that the new epsons can produce at low cost, this is a great way to label something that doesn't need to be in colour with the associated ink costs, etc.
Wonder what the resolution of the printing is, and how long it takes...
Maybe the top side could be used for additional data storage as well if you don't need a label?
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
A CD Drive costs about Rs. 1200-1500 in India.
:)
An increase of 10$ (=Rs. 500 approx) is a bit too steep. Obviously the good old felt-tip pen is much cheaper !!
But the basic idea/concept is very user friendly and cool. Wish they can make it a bit cheaper...
"Programming is like sex. Make one mistake and support it for the rest of your life !!"
This will help small software businesses lower their costs of production. My family has a business where we sell software, but where it's not practical for us to use mass production because we have to make 1000 copies minimum, since our market is so small. It's easier and cheaper for us to simply burn DVD's everytime an order comes in and print the labels ourselves, and then shrink wrap it. So this will be a real benefit to us and potentially other small business too.
I would LOVE something like that for the CD-R's of my music I sell, and send out as demos. Stick-on labels look like stick-on labels, and are barely better than magic markers.
The most impressive result I have gotten so far is by laying the cd's on the ground and spray painting them all white. Then when that layer dries, lay a stencil of an image over each disk and spray black. Leaves a cool ghosty image that looks like it was pressed. The disks play fine, and it doesn't look like your music is sponsored by TDK.
The problem with CD printers is that:
You must buy one (these drives are $10 more than normal)
You must buy ink for one (at $970 a cart, lasts for 1 week)
You have to use it often enough that the Ink doesn't dry out.
At the moment I label my CDs with a permanent ink pen, but this would save the rest of the world from my handwriting. I'm sure the Linux driver will also ship with a perl script to dump a directory listing onto the front of the CD as well.
Beep beep.
is how the disc burning software detects that you have their proprietary CD. I'd assume some sort of data on either hte top or bottom of the CD that the Drive must read before allowing it to tatoo the cd.
Kent Simon Multitheft Auto
... what the reality of pricing is going to be on these things as opposed to the probable $10 premium quoted in the article. If they really stick to that, these things are going to take off liek crazy. The one big problem with the Yamaha was the price (at least here in NZ). If this thing truly has a negligible (???) price increase, I can see them selling like mad and being put into every branded system and whitebox known to man. Can you think of an easier way of labeling small DVD backups of your data than to write it directly to the DVD through a script. No more forgetting labeling of important data.
The flipside of this is, how long will the drive actually last with the extra etching duties of the laser? Will these have a shorter warranty period than their non-ethcing counterparts? Through the first run, will we see unusually high failure rates? I haven't heard of anything like that with the Yamaha's but, then again, I haven't looked. I haven't had to. I haven't sold one yet and I think that's mainly because I haven't bought one (if you don't know the product or the brand intimately, or are unwilling to learn it, don't sell it).
Anyways, I'm done with my rant now. You can get back to reading truly thoughtful comments. :)
CliffH
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
I know what a 600dpi image looks like printed out on paper. I know that 300dpi gives a reasonable quality image too.
What sort of resolution can we expect from this?
Have many pits per inch are burned into the data side of a disk at the moment?
Can we expect the same?
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Is the appearance going to be similar to that of the data side of a CD (ie. light distortion where it is burned) or rather a 'printed' appearance?
> Only downside it seems is that you cannot use normal CDs. You have to use CDs
> which can actually are designed to allow this 'burning' on the flipside...
Why don't they sell blank labels you can stick onto normal CDs and then etch them with a laser? Or is that too obvious?
Are DVD lasers sharp enough to produce diffraction patterns, insead of a standard image?.... Could this tech be used to create you own hologram, from a 3D File?
Is it possible to have another layer of whatever they have sandwiched in their (but different of course) so that the label can be erased and rewritten?
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
http://www.lightscribe.com/user/labelTips.aspx
Closeups of different labels using this thing.
until they manufacture a drive that doesn't require you to flip the disc in order to burn the label. Eliminating that annoying step would be worth extra $$.
... is whot bwings os tugevza tsuzay.
I like to label my disks, but hesitate to do so with the normal stick on labels after a couple of bad experiences. When I used such a labeled disk in my laptop once (which can get rather hot) I smelt burned, popped the disk and found the edge of the label smouldering slightly. I also know people who've had the labels peel off slightly and gum up the drive. This sounds like an ideal solution to the problem.
I mess around as a artist time to time with different media.
This is very similar to etching print plates.
After you burn the CDROm and etch the flip side, guess what?!
You take various colored inks, fill in the etching and then wipe off the excess.
I bet you could make some realy neat looking designes with it.
I have a stack of 100 CDRs that I bought from CompUSA for cheap. They have nothing on top of the aluminium. If you rub it vigorously your finger turns silver. If you scratch it you get flakes of metal under your fingernail and you can see right through the resulting hole.
Lasers Controlled Games!
While this is absolutely cool technology as it is now, I couldn't stop wondering if there is any possibility of making color labels as sharp as this. (Hey, don't laugh at me and read on) Mutuality of this technology seems to be at the same stage as black and white picture in still photography, where light sensitive emulsion and intensity of light played roles. If it is possible to lay down three (or four: cyan, magenta, yellow and black) layers of light sensitive material to the face of CD/DVD, it *might* be possible to produce color labels with controlled laser output.
Though I don't think this will ever become mainstream, it still is a cool technology for a consumer level device. Then what came up to my mind is Kodak, whose business has been in decline since digital camera began taking over regular 35mm in low-mid priced market, but who possesses vast knowledge in science of photography. If I were working for Kodak, I would propose development of color disk label technology, for which they can exploit their expertise.
just my thoughts.
You have to wonder with the imaging application for doing graphics and the nature of CD data - tis this could lead to some steganography applications. The laser will be able to output data in such a way as to create graphics while the CD is rotating, so it can probably be programmed to read that same data and you get some pretty cool steganography applications....
I would think it would be easy to hide data in a picture made of 1s and 0s.
"Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati" -- Red Green
I expect that a few thousand (million?) others had also had that same thought at some time.
The sad fact is that millions of people have good ideas and are far too busy trying to survive to be able to get embroiled in serious product development. In any case, only a large corporation could afford to do this, the prototype would likely have cost millions.
It is unfortunate that the principles of open source can't work in hardware development, where mechanisms, mouldings and precise little bits are concerned. Otherwise, we could have lots of things sooner.
It is only going to get worse as technology advances. What gets developed depends entirely on the whims of the marketing men, an area where people of the greatest imagination are rarely to be found.
It is worth remembering that a boy called Humphrey Potter created the first self-acting steam engine, and therefore laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution, because he had better things to do than open and shut valves sequentially all day. Humphrey Potter actually achieved what the Convicted Monopolist has never achieved, and never will, he really invented something useful and innovative. It is sad that such real grass-roots innovation is scarcely possible nowadays, even the simplest thing involves far too much expense. Humphrey Potter's requirements were simple, and within reach of most people: string and pulleys for example.
Now this latest "invention" will not have the effect of Humphrey Potter's work (he caused massive unemployment of engine boys, including himself!), but the fact remains that it is late, and was not spotted by any of the large corporations who make CD and DVD writers, until recently.
Manufacturing industry needs to find a way of listening to the modern-day Humphrey Potters, not the ever so slow marketing men.
...and that a disc will cost about a dime more than today's discs.
In other words, twice as much.
I wonder if it would be possible using this to copy the label of a DVD as well. I mean, if the image is created by the DVD laser, could it be read by it?