CD Freaks takes a look at Philips DVDR16LSK/00 LightScribe

Jan installed the drive along with the Nero 6.6 software without event and discovered that the drive was identified in Windows XP as a Philips DVDR16LS. Next, we show the layout he chose for his first burn. Of course at this time, the resulting product from this layout will be a Sepia or monotone graphic, so keep that in mind when you choose your image. However, we understand that there has already been research conducted into the possibility of providing additional colors in future generations of LightScribe products.

Once we were satisfied with the image we went ahead and started the burn on the Best setting. Length of time for this process will vary on the amount of the disc covered of course, the graphic above took 23 minutes 32 seconds. However, we decided to try burning the same graphic again and used a stopwatch to compare to the time reflected in software and actual time. This burn resulted in a software report of 23m:43s. Timing by hand with a stopwatch gave us 25m:14s. So there is a bit of a difference.

During that time, you will see the following dialog box that shows the state of the process. As we were interested in producing the best contrast, we didn’t use Normal or Draft which would be considerably quicker with a much lighter result.

It’s finished, time to look at our creation! Nothin’s quite a lovin’ as something from the oven! The excitement is palpable.

Not bad actually! Text is clear and the graphic at the bottom of the Philips drive ain’t too shabby. But, is it good enough for a CD Freak? Sure, but then again, we are never satisified! After a little discussion on MSN, the decision is made to place our project back in the drive and burn the same disc again! Why? because we think we read somewhere that you can do this and the result is even darker with better contrast. But we aren’t sure, so the only thing left to do is try of course. For the second burn on the same disc we again chose the Best setting. 

Voila!

This is most interesting as we can see additional detail now, especially in areas around the DVDR16LS writing at the bottom! Of course, it’s much darker overall. Please bear in mind that these images are severely compressed JPEGs as well and some of the additional contrast is lost due to this. But the indexing capability of the hardware and software are very, very good as we can see. We can also now rest assured that we could re-use a disc many times to add additional information to the label if we wished. Could be handy indeed.

On the next page, we were joined by fellow CD Freak Seán Byrne on MSN and we began chatting a bit about what people might try to do with a LightScribe Burner that would not be in their best interest.