The following images are taken from my “ Optical Disc Corner“, where there are plenty of other retail optical discs on show. They’ve been a rare occasional find, but every time I come across them, I end up buying them. Instead, I’ve been lucky that in my occasional ferreting around the thrift stores, I’ve been able to pick up a few unused LightScribe blanks at anywhere from $0.50-$1.00 a disc.
LightScribe media is relatively rare to find since it has been discontinued for many years, however, it is available at a significant premium on auction sites such as eBay.
older LiteOn units) could be crossflashed to LightScribe-capable firmware, such drives often could not burn a LightScribe label as they were missing the extra hardware that reads the optical code burned into the centre of the disc. It’s interesting to note that while some drives (e.g. This particular unit is labelled HP, but is an LG-produced drive, model GH60L produced 16th June 2010 which is only three years until LightScribe would become unsupported. It features the LightScribe logo in the centre of the tray. This particular unit is rather anonymous from the outside, as is the case for most OEM drives. I didn’t own any LightScribe capable drives during its heyday, but because I’ve had the chance to rummage and salvage from a number of HP desktops, I took home many of their optical drives which had LightScribe capability. Ultimately, this didn’t work out so well for them … Getting a LightScribe Drive I suppose as HP was a printer manufacturer, perhaps entering the optical disc printing market with this solution was seen as another way to ensure profits which wouldn’t be shared with other printer companies. This process was marketed as “Burn, Flip, Burn”. Initially only available in a “gold” colour, media was later available in a number of colours before becoming unsupported in around 2013. This system uses an infrared laser on a specially coated media to create greyscale images on the top side of the disc. This post looks at the competing LightScribe system, invented by Hewlett Packard (HP) and released in 2004. That particular system, pioneered by Yamaha and further improved by Fujifilm, was one that I had practical experience with even though it was arguably more obscure.
Last week, I wrote about and Labelflash, labelling methods which utilised the laser inside a CD/DVD writer to create readable labels on the top and underside of discs.