Could I use lightscribe on Verbatim branded DVD+R?

[rocky12]

Would lightscribe work by burning DVD artwork on Verbatim DVD+R? Will it work with these?http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B003ZDNZSS/ref=mp_s_a_1_5?qid=1396300121&sr=8-5&pi=AC_SX110_SY165_QL70

[Noahtuck]

No.

You need litescribe disc's as they have a special surface in order to "print" or rather burn the artwork on the disc.
That is why they are called "litescribe"

[smrpix]

No. Litescribe compatible media will always be labelled as such.

[rocky12]

Thank you!

[rocky12]

I never ever bought lightscribe media before. Do they come in as 100 disc spindle and as DVD+R, and what is the best DVD+R lightscribe media? Are lightscribe media better than the non-lightscribe Verbatim media I linked too?

[turk690]

I never ever bought lightscribe media before. Do they come in as 100 disc spindle and as DVD+R, and what is the best DVD+R lightscribe media? Are lightscribe media better than the non-lightscribe Verbatim media I linked too?

Do not waste your time on lightscribe. As an optical media labeling technology, there are more disadvantages than otherwise. Let me start with the sexy one first, which goes along this line: burn your CD, then turn it over and burn the label with the same drive....! That's as good as it gets. It goes downhill from there:

• lightscribe optical media are not easy to find
• the contrast in the burned labels is very poor; no solid blacks, you get a dirty gray; for some reason there are no white labels, only a dull gray or yellow
• to actually burn the label, the laser has to be turned on full power; lightscribe drives regularly used to lightscribe are known to get damaged early on (can't read or write or both anymore)
• it takes about 5mins to burn data onto a full 4.7GB DVD-R, then anywhere from 15 to 30mins to burn the lightscribe label
• habitually leaving a lightscribed disc out under normal room lighting gradually makes the label fade, faster out under the sun

The best way I have found so far to put labels onto optical media as artful as what my imagination can conjure is through inkjet-printable media. Nowadays there are glossy waterproof inkjet printable media, readily available CD, DVD, BD. On the face of that only someone who is a glutton for punishment will still hanker after that overrated thing called lightscribe.

[Des]

I second what turk690 says,
A few years ago on the advice of jman98 I bought an Epson inkjet printer that had disk printing ability. That printer died the end of this summer. I recently replaced it with a Brother than can print on disks. The Brother is very impressive and was on sale for just under $100. It's model MFC-J870DW

Make the change, you won't regret it!

--dES

[johns0]

Hope they come out with a laser printer for discs.

[Des]

Hope they come out with a laser printer for discs.

They did...Lightscribe


--dES

[johns0]

One that puts toner on a disc,not the same thing.

[Des]

One that puts toner on a disc,not the same thing.

My bad

Doubt a disc could survive the heat of the fuser.

--dES

[johns0]

Paper survives the heat,think outside the box.

[mail2tom]

I've been using Epson printers to print directly onto white inkjet label DVD and CD media for years. If you want to get a better looking DVD label you can try the Verbatim AquaAce (p/n 8=98552), or Tayio Yuden/JVC Watershield. The Verbatim are usually cheaper, but both have given outstanding results.

[Des]

Paper survives the heat,think outside the box.

OK, so what about a dye sublimation type printer then?

Or a way to build up the static charge onto the disk surface, then instead of the disk passing under a roller a heated plate can come down into position similar to a laminating or heat press.


--dES

[Des]

Looks like there already is dye-sub for discs:
http://www.cdrom2go.com/how-it-works-thermal-re-transfer-printing-june-06-2006.aspx

--dES

[ranchhand]

Well, I have been using Lightscribe since its conception and I love it. I still have two Lightscribe burners that are IDE and they still work fine. I did have one cheapie SATA LG burner that I bought because it was low cost, and after about 3 years the Lighscribe laser died, other than that I can still use it normally for everything else. Lightscribe, on highest setting, results in (IMHO, so you naysayers don't get a red face and reach for the keyboard, ok?) a beautiful sepia antique style photo. Sepia, ok? Get it? Have you ever seen those old, antique photos that are in earth tones? That is all Lightscribe ever represented itself as producing and that is what it was created for. So attacking it as "ugly, etc" means someone doesn't like sepia tones....ok, so don't get it then.
Far as quality.... on highest settings it does what it was intended to do. I have done dozens of disks, and never had one fail, fade in light, warp or get pregnant without being married. 10 years ago when my daughter graduated university I authored all the family videos into a set of 10 DVDs, all Lightscribe burned with screengrabbed shots on the labels and text. So far they all play perfectly and non of the above problems. Good as new. I use only Verbatim brand.
Does it take 20" on highest settings? Yes it does. So...what's the burning hurry? Are you a home studio mass-producing videos? Then you shouldn't be using a tool designed for home applications. Get it?
Unfortunately, Lightscribe is disappearing so I would not recommend investing in it. You can still get disks and Verbatim still makes them, but there aren't many burners out there any more. I have purchased a couple, and stocked up on disks so it will hold me for a few years, but the page of technical fickleness has turned and LS is not long for this world.
Anyway, one man's opinion.

[jman98]

Thanks for listening to me, Des! For the record, I have used Canon printers for some years now, but there's no problem with using Epson.

I used to be a big supporter of Lightscribe printing. I used to make my own labels sometimes and some of them turned out really well. Years ago when the first ink jet printers came out that could print directly on discs, the cost was like $200 - $300 US for the printers alone, so going with Lightscribe made a lot of financial sense - at the time. I stuck with it for a couple of years but in the end I gave up and moved to printing directly to disc labels. The quality of my very best Lightscribe label cannot in any way compare with what you can do with full color printing directly to discs with an ink jet printer. If some old guy like ranchhand gets his jollies from Lightscribe (and it is April 1 so for all I know he is April Fooling us For the record I am NOT doing an April Fool's joke with this post.) that's fine, but it would be insane to recommend it to a new person. Here's why Lightscribe is a bad idea.
1) If you print as dark as you can, it will take 20 minutes. I can fully print full color labels on my ink jet printer right to the disc in about 1 minute.
2) Lightscribe is only monochrome. Ink jet printing to a disc can be full color. Plus, if you use Taiyo Yuden's Watershield brand of discs, the labels you print yourself can look as good as professional ones. I've seen some pretty good Lightscribe labels, but even the very best look "old timey" and inferior to what you can do with full color on an inkjet printer.
3) Even if you can find the time for a 20 minute Lightscribe label burn, at the end there is some chance that the label still may not be dark enough. Your only and unpleasant option is to do a (gulp) risky dual burn where you burn the label on top of itself again. I did that once. ONCE. It did make my label look like I wanted, but the cost was high - my burner was never the same after that. More on that next.
4) EVERY Lightscribe burner I've ever used had a short lifespan after I started using it to burn Lightscribe labels. Others here have reported the same. I had 3 different drives I used. About 1 year was the average you could expect a drive to last before it would either stop burning CDs but be OK with single layer DVDs or vice-versa. All my drives stopped burning DL DVD media correctly as the first sign of trouble. Are you really willing to replace your drive every year? You better be if you want to use Lightscribe. Yes, I know that ranchhand will come back and tell us that he has been using the same drive for 100 years now, blah blah blah. More power to him. Your results will very likely be like mine and not his.
5) My discs are properly stored in conditions without a lot of humidity or temperature fluctuations and out of direct sunlight and some of my labels have very badly faded. In a few more years they probably won't be readable at all.

Using Lightscribe sounds great, but in the end it's not really worth the effort when disc label printing is so much better, lasts so much longer, and is arguably more affordable now anyway.

[rocky12]

@turk 690:

Would these be the ones to burn official custom DVD labels onto the DVDs? http://www.rima.com/prod/1734-100.html

And how am I doing this? I never done this before so I don't know where to start and end. I also would need to buy those DVDs.

[rocky12]

@jman98:

Thank you! I will take your advice fully and don't use Lightscribe.

[ranchhand]

it would be insane to recommend it to a new person

Hey jman, put your hatchet away. Read my post carefully before getting a red face and grabbing the keyboard. Don't take life so seriously, you'll spoil your dinnertime.

[turk690]

So attacking it as "ugly, etc" means someone doesn't like sepia tones....

I don't think anyone in this thread, or for that matter forum, was thrashing lightscribe. I for one am simply telling it like it is. Years ago, like jman here, I was also a lightscribe user. I put labels on my event videos and all that. I even put them on compilation MP3 CDs. That the contrast was poor and there was, oh well, a sepia tone didn't bother or amaze me either way. I was in the middle east then and would bring the MP3 CDs on long drives on highways that cut through desert. After a few months of using, I noticed that, in a span of just a weekend (driving to Bahrain to and from riyadh, saudi arabia), labels on some lightscribed CDs would fade so at first glance it would seem I didn't even print anything there at all! It reminded me of some thermal paper supermarket checkout counter receipts: holding them in my hand, by the time I packed the loot I bought in the car trunk just out in the mall parking lot, they had turned black! It may or may not be because of the 42°C heat, zero humidity, and/or unbridled amounts of shameless sunshine, but hey, if this is lightscribe as it is, it needs further refinement. After less than a year, I decided to look for another optical disc labeling system and took a chance on the thermal printing system touted by Casio with its CW-100. The labels produced with this had sharp contrast, were more or less permanent, and save for a blank area on the disc label side, didn't need specialized discs to print on to. When the store I normally bought the thermal transfer ink cartridges from ran out of them, I decided to climb on the inkjet bandwagon. The first printer I bought was an Epson Artisan 700. The things I printed on discs were limited only by my imagination! The one little problem I did see was that the beautifully printed labels would get smudged if handled by oily fingers or liquid dropped on them. But I soon got a way around this by simply spraying a coat of clear acrylic on top. I changed over to a Canon MG5220, because the CD/DVD loading system of the Epson was a bit too complicated. Nowadays I exclusively use JVC/Taiyo Yuden waterproof inkjet media, and really, could lightscribe even get near to the how fab these are:

You may even create pictures on the inkjet disc labels with a sepia tint!
In between red face, hatchet, and keyboard grabbing, I suggest you try inkjet optical media. Your personalization talents will come to the fore ever more!
Lastly, the last time I heard, lightscribe progenitor HP has quietly dropped support for it and will discontinue. If the lightscribe gods can be so heartless, what about us mere mortals?

Would these be the ones to burn official custom DVD labels onto the DVDs? http://www.rima.com/prod/1734-100.html
And how am I doing this? I never done this before so I don't know where to start and end. I also would need to buy those DVDs.

Those are OK and I have used them but if the discs are going to be handled roughly, the ink may smudge. These are better http://www.rima.com/prod/1778-50.html
They are glossy waterproof, like the disc on the right in the pic above, and your beautiful label will resist oily fingers for its lifetime. Of course you first have to have a printer; having used both Epson and Canon, I prefer Canon's because it has a separate caddy where you load the disc with. I start with a *.PSD template I create in Photoshop; drag an ellipse selection in a 1000x1000 pixel blank image to make a circle, then start populating that circle with what you want. Save to a *.jpg file, then open this in the CD printing app that comes with the Canon, and print away...

[fritzi93]

Hmm, I used to do lightscribe but now have a printer (Epson Artisan 725) that can print discs. I sure wouldn't go back to lightscribe.

To keep things in perspective though, if you don't intend to get a printer that can print discs, I suppose lightscribe may be satisfactory. I still have a fair number that haven't faded (much) and are still perfectly legible. I keep them out of the light, of course. Text labels are best with lightscribe, in a big plain font. Fancy artwork, not so much.

[johns0]

The best printing format i found was in a device called "a sharpie".

[Noahtuck]

The best printing format i found was in a device called "a sharpie".

LOL!!!

Yep!!

Had a couple of epson printers with external ink tanks and printed some killer artwork on printable dvdr's but in the end who gives a F!?!?!
It was cool for about a minute then it came down to, who looks at the disc and i want to watch the movie/video and I just need to know what is on it!!

SHARPIE!!!!!!!!

[turk690]

...but in the end who gives a F!?!?! It was cool for about a minute then it came down to, who looks at the disc and i want to watch the movie/video and I just need to know what is on it!!...

Yea, well, sharpie for most of mine, but inkjet for the people who asked me to do their event, no?

[ranchhand]

Definitely Lightscribe is on its way out, as I said previously. So the rest becomes academic anyway. I wonder if I have never had those problems because I use Verbatim disks? I dunno.

[jman98]

Definitely Lightscribe is on its way out, as I said previously. So the rest becomes academic anyway. I wonder if I have never had those problems because I use Verbatim disks? I dunno.

I used nothing but Verbatim myself, yet many of my properly stored disc labels are still fading away...

[Des]

For printing one or two discs at a time I liked Lightscribe. I worked with the sepia tone and designed my labels that way, or I just printed text.
I had a Samsung burner. My trouble began when the burner stopped recognizing LS DVDs but could still recognize LS CDs. I read that this is not uncommon.
Reflashing firmware did not fix it. I bought another Samsung LS burner to finish the project then invested in the inkjet for discs. I never looked back.

I only used Verbatim discs, and still do. Most have the LS discs I did have noticeably faded some, even in their jewel cases in a book case. I have only had one client ask me to reburn a disc with a new label because there's faded too much. So there is some longevity it seems to LS imprinted discs, but the inkjet really has more going for it all around.

Now if we can just get a laser printed one...

--dES

[rocky12]

I don't like the idea that I populate what I want to print. Someone here told me on his old laptop it came with a program but he forgets the name and I could either have any picture on the DVD disc or have the exact on the DVD disc to make it official and he forgets the name of the program.

[rocky12]

I don't know if this would help but on my disc drive tray, it says DVD +/- RW/RAM/LabelFlash.