Lightscribe Drives

[Rossco]

Anyone got one of these. Bought a new Asus DVD drive that does this without even knowing it had it. Never heard of it til I read the manual afew days after installing it!

For anyone that doesnt know, its basicially a drive you use with specially treated discs which you turn over once the data is burned and the laser can then burn images onto the disc. So its just like printing on the disc with your DVD writer. Quite a cool thing.

Only problem is I dont have any discs yet, I can get some on Ebuyer easy and they're dead cheap anyway, no different really to normal ones, and thats good Infiniti discs too BUT I want Dual Layer too. Which I cant find!

Also, I really grudge buying DVDs and CDs on their own from Ebuyer as they charge loads for delivery considering its something so small.

So does anyone know any good cheap websites for optical discs that may stock these, and also, whoever has a Lightscribe drive, impressions please!

[briareos_kerensky]

Found a lightscribe single-sided DVD once and it was far from cheap, almost the price of a double-sided disc. Also, at that time, only a very small number of drives supported the feature and the best was a Philips drive that was inferior to other drives in almost everything - seek times were especially awful.
BTW, I had only a limited experience with these first generation lightscribe drives, but since the technology is proprietary and it's not that widespread, I doubt they advanced from where they were.
Lightscribing a disc requires multiples passes, the more passes the darker the scribing will become. Unfortunately each pass take quite some time, around 5 mins and the first two passes make the scribing almost readable, not enough contrast between the surface and the scribing, a soft-tip marker is better if you just have to write down something on the disc.
Scribing pictures, however, is good as the scribing software automatically converted images on the fly - still, there was the problem of multiple, lengthy passes. Considering that I use DVDs as backup for my stuff, scribing images was useless and writing on it was too time consuming.
Theorically scribes should last much longer than markers, but I consider Lightscribe an extra that should be avoided if it makes the drive particularly slow in other areas.

[ExpertKing]

http://svp.co.uk/searchresults.php?sSrch=lightscribe&Submit.x=0&Submit.y=0&Submit=Search