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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"
Cool idea...
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...
"Programming is like sex. Make one mistake and support it for the rest of your life !!"
maybe it can copy the do not copy label while you're copying the data
I actually read the article, and THAT ROCKS.
The porn applications alone are mind-boggling.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
I'll bet it makes perfect toast too.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
Have to wonder if this process will shorten the life of the cd the way adhesive labels are rumoured to do...
The real leap forward will occur when this is built into camcorders and other media recording devices. The whole idea behind connecting the camera to a computer just so you can save the data on a disc that won't be played on a computer anyway, not to mention printing labels for the disc, is crazy and redundant. Though it is a necessary stopgap until we get these technologies into the cameras, the computer is just another barrier to the development of user-created media.
I have been pwned because my
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 !!"
It's just thermal printing with another twist. The good news is that there are no ink cartridges to replace. The bad news is that the paper is _really_ expensive.
My blog
I don't need new tech and new burnable media to keep doing that.
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.
because they are giving a new lease of life to an already saturated market; i'm happy with my 32x burner and would not have thought of investing in another cd-burner... and would have upgraded to a dvd-burner whenever i could afford one... but now.. I'll HAVE to consider this... :D
:p how long would it take to burn a full gfx rich label?
we'll have happy cd-writer manufacturers, happy cd-manufacturers, happy geeks and very happy software pirates
I missed this detail, but what speed does it burn the label at?
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
as soon as the printing department hear about this we'll shortly have do it yourself home tatoo kits.. now that'd be cool.
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.
Anyone remember the CD bomb from the days when the Anarchists Cookbook circulated?
Take a CD, cover with gunpowder or phosphor scraped from match heads. Varnish. Insert into CD rom drive.
Now immagine how well that would work with a laser set to a power high enough to carve images into plastic.
Kaaaaaaboooom.
Beep beep.
... 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
the problem with regular CDRs is that if you bang them around enough the silver stuff (what the data is burned to) flakes off because it's not encased in the plastic. Those glue on labels help to weaken it. If you try to take a label off, chances are the data goes with it.
Presumably this new method has the label part manufactured on and not attached to the part of the CD the data is written to. Or it's a second layer that more painted on than glued on. However it's done, it's probably much more sound manufacturing than putting a sticker on a CD.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Now if it were holograms, I'd be impressed.
:-)
/ I mean, what we got freakin' LASERs in these things for anyway?
yes, we have no bananas
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.
To do so requires special writing capability in the drive itself, you not only need to be able to control the regular user data, you also need to be able to control all the bits that get generated in addition to regular user data. All the bits that are involved with the error correction, etc. This is why you don't see Yamaha type 'tattoos' with just any old drive, because Yamaha so far is the only manufacturer that gave you that much control over the drive. Without such deep control, I don't know how easy it would be to get your desired image, considering you normally have control over much less than half of how many bits are actually contained on a CD. I vaguely recall doing the math one day to see how many raw bits are on a CD, and I think it adds up to around 2GB of raw data to store your 700MB of user data. Very vaguely. Figures may be off, but it is in that ridiculous ballpark. And I'm not in the mood to go digging through specs. Basically, 2048 bytes of your data first goes to 2352 bytes, maybe another step here, and then every 8 bits gets translated to 14 bits encoded on the disc. Even just the 2048->2352 and 8->14 steps gives you almost 1407MB raw data for 700MB of user data.
I can't imagine any better way to produce a professional looking CD than with technology like this. Sure it is no better than a sharpie for home users, but for people who burn demo CDs or sell software online and want to make it look professional, this is about as good as it gets.
An with a number of things in the real world CR-Writers with LightScribe technology and the special CDs are obviously prone to the chicken or egg syndrome
The special CDs won't become popular until the special CD Writers become common and the CD Writers won't become common until the special CDs become common enough...
"Programming is like sex. Make one mistake and support it for the rest of your life !!"
Now we can get our AOL discs with even MORE style!
The official website has more info and photos of labled disks.
This is a great little feature. Not that I plan to burn great images on the disk. Rather, I plan to burn the contents of the disk - maybe just do an ls -lR | burnlabel. I don't use jewelcases for my CD's or DVD's. They take up too much space. I just keep them in sheets in a binder. The downside is, that the small slip of paper telling me what's on the disk has a limited life span (i.e. I lose it somewhere). This little gimmick will rid me of that problem by fixing the contents to the disk.
Underholdning.info
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?
Now the RIAA will get all concerned about pirated album covers ...
Here is a PDF from HP all about it
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.
The reason for the 8 -> 14 bit encoding is to make sure that long runs of 0's do not exist. If they did, the laser would be unable to follow the track accurately.
Predictive text is shiv!
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!
There are simpler methods to ensure that a long string of 0's doesn't occur, without 40% redundancy.
The real reason for the encoding is FEC or Forward Error Correction. It ensures that if you lose a bit here and there, there is enough redundant information spread around the damaged part to reconstruct the original data stream.
Permanent markers are always best, unless you need to write more information than a few simple words. Which is what I suspect most people need. Labels are much easier, when you want to list multiple items that are on the cd. The problem, however is that the labels can cause lots of problems. Causing the media to wobble and reduce read times, or worse coming loose while spinning in the drive. This "new" printing tech, sounds like it can fix these problems quite well. I'm sure drives (and media) for this will become much cheaper over time as the ever increasing drive speeds warrant using it.
Just FYI, to anyone who has newer cd roms/writers: #1 use all 4 screws #2 don't use labels unless absolutely necessary
The FAQ at: http://www.lightscribe.com/ says it can take 1-15 min to burn a label depending on how detailed the image is.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Commissioner Lal
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