Hi all,

I just came across this announcement at Slashdot to a new DVD Burner from HP. PC World announcement

This new drive purportedly uses the recording laser and a mirror to etch a lable on the top of the disc. The photo shows a nice grey-scale etching on top of the DVD. Article claims drive to be $10US more than current drives, and a special media for $0.10US.

Now with all of the problems with ink chemicals, and lables, do you guys think that there would be any archival problems with a solution like this?

I personally think this is a really cool feature and I could see myself reburning my entire flac collection to have custom etchings. But then again, I'm a bit of a freak for consistency.

Later,
Cal

That's definitely cool. It's a small picture, but the etching looks a lot more professional than most inkjet printable media that you need the special printers for.



The article didn't say anything about a mirror. You have to flip the disc.

I can't see there being any problems with using this on your archival discs. We're talking about special discs with cheap dye on top for burning the label. The laser is nowhere near powerful enough to burn through that and interfere with the actual DVD media.



This is probably because HP wants a $10 licensing fee for LightScribe. I seriously doubt there is anything special about the hardware whatsoever. The technology probably consists of simply burning a label layer in a CD-R-like writing mode almost exactly the same as Yamaha's DiscTattoo.

You might even be able to flip the disc and simply burn regular CD-R info on it. That would be pretty cool to be able to print labels on your DVD-R movies and then store 700MB of PAR2 data on the back of your DVD-R data archives.

... save that the LightScribe surface seems (from the photos and description) to be closer to the top of a printable CD than to the recordable surface of a CD-R. I doubt you would be able to store any readable data on the LightScribe surface.

Still, I am curious how the drive would behave if one told it the disc had been flipped, but if in reality the record surface was still face-down. Presumably the device would be intelligent enough not to over-write existing data, but might it be possible to have a disc with LightScribe etching on one surface, and something resembling a DiscT@2 on the other? (Not terribly useful, but one must examine the potential of the technology, if nothing else!)

- M.