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"

Comments

Other uses

[CleverNickedName]

I'll bet it makes perfect toast too.

Is it more than cosmetic?

[__aatgod8309]

Have to wonder if this process will shorten the life of the cd the way adhesive labels are rumoured to do...

Re:Cool !!

[Kent Simon]

I pretty much figured that would be the case. The data on a CD is stored very close to the label. If you have a CDR you don't mind wasting you could scratch part of the label and see that it goes straight to the plastic protective layer. I imagine the special CD's have an extra layer between the top and the data layer that does not exist on a normal CDR.

10$ = Rs 500 approx

[varunrebel]

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... :)

Tell you the truth

[SyKOStarchild]

As potentially useful as it would be to use one of these things for CD/DVD Labeling, I am awful fond of saving money and will continue just using a sharpie or an adhesive.

I don't need new tech and new burnable media to keep doing that.

Small business use....

[MagicDude]

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.

its brilliant

[katalyst]

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...
we'll have happy cd-writer manufacturers, happy cd-manufacturers, happy geeks and very happy software pirates :D
I missed this detail, but what speed does it burn the label at? :p how long would it take to burn a full gfx rich label?

Excellent for musicians

[nmoog]

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.

Re:Excellent for musicians

[Hungus]

You can of course buy printable CDs and DVDs and use a printer like the one I use which is an ezcd4200 it costs me about 12 extra per cd or dvd but I do get full colour with it. Oh and if you are going to do any volume remeber to buy a continuous flow system for your pritner. In fact here is a tutorial I found on hacking your own CFS System

Re:Cool !!

[superhoe]

And this makes me wonder:

If the burners with this new technology are just $10 more expensive - and the media required to burn to the flipside is just a 'dime more expensive'.. Where's the added value to the sales?

My guess is that we end users are going to pay much more than just a dime xtra for those CD medias.. :(

Hmmm ...

[the bluebrain]

Now if it were holograms, I'd be impressed.

:-)

/ I mean, what we got freakin' LASERs in these things for anyway?

Re:burning images onto normal cdrs

[_Shorty-dammit]

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.

Chicken or Egg situation

[varunrebel]

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...

http://www.lightscribe.com/

[Anonymous Coward]

The official website has more info and photos of labled disks.

All your image ...

[elronxenu]

Now the RIAA will get all concerned about pirated album covers ...

Here is a PDF from HP all about it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a PDF from HP all about it

here ya go.

[Niacin]

http://www.lightscribe.com/user/labelTips.aspx

Closeups of different labels using this thing.

Re:burning images onto normal cdrs

[smellystudent]

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.

Re:Cool !!

[no longer myself]

My guess is probably not. It's got a little extra nift value, but it's really all in the software. They're using the exact same laser, so the hardware isn't any different except for maybe an extra bit of firmware to prevent knock-off CD-Rs from entering the scene. Everything else is handled by software, so the extra $10 on top of a DVD burner is the only hope they have of getting people to consider it. Much more and who would bother?

For the other end, the consumable disc, an extra $0.10 has a huge fudge factor. Prices vary greatly so they're probably basing it upon the highest priced premium brand of DVD/CD-R (which isn't necessarily any better than the low cost cheepy-brand) so yes, you'll end up spending $10 for about 25 discs, while someone else is going to be paying $15 for a spindle of 100.

My biggest gripe (and you know I'll get flamed for saying this...): Since (I'm only guessing) it's all based in software, it will probably not be a feature availble to Linux users.

Looks like Sharpie isn't going to lose any of my business anytime soon. ;-)

ink and burn = cd tatoos.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Speed

[Tomato3]

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.