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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.
... 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.
> 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?
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 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!