Benq and Lacie make DVD labelling easy

HOW DO you label a newly-created CD or DVD? There are pens, which are cheap and simple, but ugly. And there are sticky labels, which do the job but are a hassle to use, what with positioning them accurately, smoothing out air bubbles, and ensuring they never come unstuck inside the drive (which is a messy disaster). You can even buy printers that print directly onto CDs - usually special white blanks. You can get great results, but the printers and materials can be expensive.

LightScribe is an elegant answer to this problem. First, burn the CD or DVD as normal, then just flip the disc over and the same laser that recorded your data burns a label on the other side. Labels are in shades of grey only, and you need to use special LightScribe compatible disks. But there's no ink, no sticky labels, no extra equipment needed, and you can even create labels with graphics and photos. Sounds good, but how well does it work? To find out, I tested some LightScribe-enabled drives.

The drives I tried are the internal BenQ DW1625 and the external LaCie d2 DVD±RW with LightScribe. These are currently selling for arout US$75 and $120, respectively. I also contacted Hewlett-Packard and Philips. Philips declined to supply a drive for testing (however, the LaCie product tested is based on a Philips OEM drive). HP did not reply. HP, incidentally, is the owner and developer of the LightScribe technology.

Other than the ability to burn LightScribe discs, both the drives I tested are perfectly normal recent generation DVD burners. They can handle all common media formats, including double layer discs. See the BenQ and LaCie websites for full specifications. Note that, like most other drives on the market, these two are relatively slow writing double layer discs.

While the BenQ model I tested is an internal unit, the LaCie product is an external drive, with FireWire and USB 2 interfaces. It comes with a power supply and all cables. It looks good, with its attractive aluminium outer case. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, It's a shame that LaCie couldn't put a door on the front. It's a bit disappointing to look at the front of the sleek silver case and see a boring old DVD-ROM face staring back at you. The metal case makes it heavy, too. However, it does feel extremely sturdy, like something that would stand up to plenty of travelling. As well as the aluminium panels on the outside, there's also a rigid metal chassis hidden inside to protect the drive - no flimsy plastic here.

The actual drive unit inside the LaCie box is a Philips 8651. In fact this appears to be a very similar drive to the BenQ DW1625 - that isn't particularly surprising, as BenQ doesn't do its own manufacturing.

The printed instruction manuals supplied with these products are very basic. There's extensive documentation on the accompanying CDs. LaCie's on disc manual is particularly good. There's lots of detail here, and a clear writing style that will be a godsend to the less technically-literate. The software installation instructions are slightly at variance with the actual software on the disc, however.

Both products come with extensive software packages. Apart from the obvious disc-burning and label design software, there are also video encoding utilities, CD-rippers, and even audio players. As far as the core functions go, the LaCie package (mostly from Roxio) is more polished, while the Nero software supplied with BenQ's drive is perhaps more powerful.

From my fairly cursory examination, all the software seems to be quite polite. It asks you before associating itself with filetypes, and lets you turn off system tray icons.

To create a LightScribe label for a disc, you use the label or cover design software. I liked the SureThing CD labeler supplied with the LaCie drive. Like all of Nero's offerings, Nero's label designer looks a bit clunky and has unintuitive icons. On the other hand, it does have multiple levels of undo, which lets you learn by simply trying stuff out (the LaCie software can only undo the last action).

For both these products, the documentation of LightScribe features looks like it is tacked on to an existing, non-LightScribe package. I'm not sure if this indicates lukewarm support for LightScribe, or just that these drives are still under development.

Bizarrely, neither product makes it obvious where to find information on how to use LightScribe. If you search through the package, the only clear indication you'll find is the label on the utilities disc. Geeks won't have any trouble with this, of course. But the average consumer can't even cope with the difference between DVD+R and DVD-R. So I would imagine there are a fair number of people out there who have been sold a LightScribe drive, but aren't too sure what LightScribe is, and have never used it. Some kind of single-page quick start guide, along the lines of: ' How to create a label with LightScribe', would be a very good idea.

Once you've located the label design software, creating a label is simple. You can use all available text fonts, graphics, photos and so on. The software makes it easy to curve text around the disc. You can also easily use existing titles and track listing from an audio CD.

Actually burning the label is rather slow. LightScribe uses the drive's laser to effect a permanent chemical change in a light sensitive layer on the top surface of the disc. Apparently this needs a lot of power, as the label is burnt with the disc spinning at 1x speed. A full size label will take about 30 minutes to create. You can save time by creating a label that only covers part of the disc. There are also lower contrast modes, where the label burning process skips alternate lines. These result in rather faint labels, though.

LightScribe's overall contrast is a bit low, with black tending to be more of a dark shade of grey. Text was legible down to around 6 points, although 10 or twelve points is more suitable for reading at a distance or in low light. With text of this size, labels are very legible.

The two companies that supplied review units were rather miserly with blank LightScribe discs (BenQ supplied one; the LaCie package just contained a non-LightScribe DVD-R blank). This forced me to go out and actually buy a few discs myself. Which is a good thing, because it brought me face-to-face with LightScribe's biggest drawback. The blank media prices are shocking: In local shops: US$2.50 to $3 for a single DVD+R (and even at the cheapest online outlets, I couldn't find any for less than $1.50 including delivery). By comparison, standard DVD+R discs cost under US$0.40. LightScribe CD-R discs have a similarly painful price premium.

I hope Hewlett-Packard quickly figures out it needs to make profits on volume sales of media, not by ridiculous inflation of the unit price. If not, I think LightScribe's long term survival is in doubt. It would be a great shame if the technology disappears, because this is an innovation which really does make sense and could, if marketed and licensed sensibly, become a standard feature of future optical drives. µ