HP LightScribe: More info

I’ve been get­ting a lot of feed­back regard­ing LightScribe, the new tech­nol­ogy for writ­ing labels on CDs and DVDs.

First of all, a cor­rec­tion to the pre­vi­ous entry: In that entry, I said that LightScribe was a silk screen­ing tech­nol­ogy. Steve Loughran, who worked on the tech­nol­ogy, points out that

It has been likened silk screen­ing, but it is def­i­nitely not: it is laser print­ing at v. high res­o­lu­tion onto discs.

This is an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion that I missed out on.

Another alert reader pointed out to me that LightScribe now has its own site. From there, one can learn more about the tech­nol­ogy and licens­ing information.

More details:

• At the cur­rent time, LightScribe will work with Win­dows 2000 and Win­dows XP but sup­port for addi­tional oper­at­ing sys­tems will come in the future.
• The new tech­nol­ogy will not have much of an impact on prices, adding only a few pen­nies to the price of disc media and a few dol­lars to the price of a computer.
• LightScribe-enabled disc dri­ves will also be avail­able as peripherals
• Basic print­ing will take about a minute to com­plete but more com­plex images can take up to 15 min­utes to print.

I do believe that LightScribe has the poten­tial of being a very dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy for the media indus­try and, unfor­tu­nately, a boon to piracy, as it will lower the bar on cre­at­ing pro­fes­sional look­ing CDs and DVDs. For exam­ple, what hap­pens when some­one down­loads a whole album in MP3 for­mat from a peer to peer net­work, copies those tracks to a disk, and then prints the disk’s label with LightScribe. How will one then know the dif­fer­ence between the orig­i­nal and a counterfeit?