TH-camrs are underappreciated. You have literally documented, researched, and presented tech history in a straightforward and memorable manner whilst also making people laugh with shenanigans.
For the record i barely tolerate the shenanigans however clearly i stay for the amazing information, but hey if jesus christ couldn't win everyone over why should he? Guys a good dude, just a bit fuckin annoying.
@@amiga2025 I was so excited when our new computer had one, then immediately disappointed when it turned out all greasy/blurry looking haha. If I knew CDs were so much better than DVDs I might have at least played around with it so much more.
So, something interesting. UCLA researchers are using Lightscribe to print graphene circuit boards on a thin layer of graphene oxide. Normally, graphene, much more graphene circuit boards, would take forever to make. Then, they discovered, the rust form, graphene oxide, was sensitive to intense light. Then, one of them recalled that Lightscribe is able to print on really thin layers of photosensitive material to make images. They make a thin layer of graphene oxide on top of a Lightscribe disk, Let it dry, and design their circuit boards on something like the Nero essentials
I was wondering if somebody would bring that up here, as I was in that lab at that time. LightScribe drives were already hard getting hard to come by when we were working on it, so we had to order "new old stock" drives by the (literal) dozen, since we were burning out about one a week. We were switching over to low-power laser tables by the time I left.
A quick explanation as to why the laser diode is lit all the time; what you're seeing when it's not writing is the laser diode in bias mode, laser diodes are very slow (relatively speaking) when switching from off to on, so the diode is kept on at low (bias) power which enables it to switch to writing power much faster.
I had a Lightscribe drive in high school on my first custom PC. I did a lot of personal movie projects and school video projects. It made it look so much better. The common reaction was, "Whoa! How did you do that?" Considering I still only burned less than 100 DVDs during its entire use, it was still pretty cool. I still have my "first film" with my lightscribe logo on it, even with a fake PG-13 label and everything on it to make it look like a commerical dvd.
Howdy! I feel icky for the use of a particular word in the closing section and I need to say something about it because... icky. I regret saying that other channels "resort" to outside sponsorship. A much better word would have been "rely". Or even better, I should have not said anything. However channels make themselves possible is fine with me, and there are some people (like Jay Foreman, for example) who make the best and most hilarious sponsorship spots you can imagine. Nonetheless, I find it delightful that with the support of Patreon, this channel can keep going with complete editorial freedom. Especially when it gets all weird and cringey. That's why I'm always thanking the Patreon crew. It's amazing what people like you can do. So please pardon the inadvertent shade thrown on others. That was not intended. Be a nice person. It's always better. Thank you for reading this mushy comment.
I knew what you meant, but it was good to make it clear anyway since most people on TH-cam (and, well, anywhere) don't usually take the time to practice the Principle of Charity these days. Thanks for another great lesson on technology and its history.
Do you have plans to see up the writing methods to other disc-based media storage ? I'm thinking non-optical methods or so... would be interesting I suppose ! Though I could understand they'd very obscure and very hard to procure.
Cool video, if you need any help with a DVD-R episode then I would love to help, I worked for one of the major manufacturers in the early days to the technology.
I seem to remember a device that would not only burn discs, it also had a printer that would label them with ink. I seem to also remember the ink would get sticky and it just sucked. Would love to see that one shown too.
I still use lightscribe all the time when I want to make music CDs from artists that don't release their music on CDs. It's a lot of fun to design your own CD covers for lightscribe. The trick is to print to the disc 3 times. It may take a long time, but it makes the design a lot bolder and more crisp.
I was wondering if it could be done. I don’t remember much, but I think I had started one once and had to do it over again. I believe it was on the same disc but I just can’t remember.
I loved Lightscrbe and used it all the time back in college. I was so sad when it died out. And yes, I have a vivid recollection of the smell of the new spindles.
@@littlejackalo5326 i have an usb one, i had needed it as reader to instal a program i bought to verify it .. it was only slightly more expensive to buy a writer... can't say i use it over a couple of times a year... i mean to use it to re-read old dvd's and back them up before they become unreadable... and laptop have no build in onces any more for years now :).
I had a Lightscribe drive in an HP desktop way back when and got my share of use from it. That being said even if the format had gained more popularity at the time, the profit would have been short-lived given the looming obsolescence of optical storage media. It wasn't the greatest quality for sure, but given LaserJet drives and discs could run 5 times the cost at least, Lightscribe was effective labeling that didn't break the bank.
my dad was very "early adopter" with all kinds of technology and we had a couple lightscribe burners and spindles of discs kicking around for years. as a kid i thought it was the coolest thing ever and i always thought it was a shame the technology just kind of died out. thanks for visiting it and shining some light on what i consider a forgotten gem from the disc burning era!
My dad had at least one too. But he later got something that would do colour more like a regular printer, and not take quite as long. I went to a private school that did a lot of musical programs so he'd record those and then people who wanted to could get a copy of the program to watch at home. I kind of miss those days because now that video files are HD or 4K and much larger, you can't just hand someone an SD card with a 20GB+ video on it, and it's too big to email, so it's like you upload it unlisted to TH-cam, or don't share it at all. I mean, he does still have all that gear, dozens of DVD-Rs and an old PC specifically saved to use apps that don't work on new Mac systems so he could still do it, but a lot of people don't use DVDs anymore. Laptops don't come with disk readers, and a lot of people don't have a DVD player for a TV since everything went to streaming.
@@joyloxI mean, there are blank Blu-Rays but they never had Lightscribe so they'd never look professional unless he invested in a screen printing setup.
Now that I think of it, that's probably where the names for those Undertale characters came from. I've never played Undertale, but people will not fucking shut up about it.
Related to that, I've had a Labelflash DVD/CD drive for years and thought just that. I'm surprised NEC of all companies made it, this one is kinda versatile though.
I was like this for a good while until I ended up seeing discs with the LightScribe logo on it. I had no clue, I ended up buying it and making a few discs with images.
it´s one of those thing you were braging about to your friends and then used it twice, realized how expensive it is and then heart that there are regular printer that than do colour pics for much cheaper ... and never used them either :D
You are right about LightScribe being underappreciated. I bought a bunch of these drives and disks in 2013 for use in my personal lab and when I ran out a few years later, I couldnt find them anymore. I always wondered what happened. I loved Lightscribe and made thousands of CDs and DVDs for coworkers. Thanks for this.
@@lillexus5589 Can confirm. Have 2 old HP PCs laying around (desktops) and now have a 2007/2010 Lightscribe drive and a newer 2016 regular drive in my large case lol!
See if you can buy a junk lot of old DVD drives. I did that once. Paid about 15 dollars NZD for like 12 or 13 DVD drives of which at least 8 were lightscribe but there were at least 50 drives in there. I recommend going to a e waste or a local second hand or landfill store (If you have one)
Me and a friend both had LightScribe burners. He'd use it constantly to label pira... back-up copies. I was fine with using a marker. Never used the thing.
Geez, Comic Sans is my favorite font for disk labels. Nice clean look, but not too formal, nor goofy or distracting. I only use it for disk titles though, and typically just use either one of the common sans-serif (Ariel or Calibri) or serif (Times Roman) for 'body text'. thus conforming to 'good practice' as I learned it whilst studying editing and professional page layout many moons ago.
My sister messed with those full sized stickers that covered the whole disk. I had a tower with 5 or 6 burners on it. Charged a buck for each disk, buck fity for a DVD. Back in the day when people would keep giving mix disks to each other, I made a solid return on that tower.
It was a great idea that I wished would have stuck around for a while. I still occasionally will (try if it completes) burn a custom CD for road trips or such. Wish they would have had Blu-ray discs for lightscribe. I would use it more frequently. Still have a spindle of cd's & dvd's for lightscribe, and my portable blu-ray burner actually does lightscribe.
As an audio mastering engineer I loved LightScribe discs. Much better than paper stick on or a Sharpie when tagging a reference CDR for a customer. Really looked professional.
I'm familiar with the phrase from the guitar/bass amp tube market, people buying ancient but still new in box tubes from like Russian aircraft and stuff because they are so reliable, lol.
I actually had a job where we needed to provide 5~10 copies of custom professional DVDs to clients every week or so - LightScribe was definitely our preferred label option. Because of the time they took, we'd print them as soon as we possibly could, typically several days before the DVD content itself was ready to be burned. We had a couple LightScribe burners on computers that were otherwise being used, so we would simply start the printing process for a disc when we were getting ready to go to lunch or go home for the day. Due to typically 1 or 2 bad label burns, per client, we also ended up needing to print more labeled discs than we actually needed, which added to costs, but was still significantly less costly than other professional-looking options. For our purposes, LightScribe was almost perfect, but if you needed more than about 10 good labels a week, there were definitely better options! I only found out toward the end of my time in that job that you could re-burn them, but it helped on several occasions and was just downright pretty cool to do (I'm not sure why it made me happy, but it did). Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
@@brendancross2767 According to who? Over 99% of phones on the market currently have built-in headphones jacks. Phones are used primarily as multimedia devices.
@@brendancross2767 Bluetooth as a subversive mechanism allowing inter-device transmission of data scavenged from users devices including a various assortment of 'Smart' devices and being ultimately relayed to APPLE - GOOGLE - AMAZON - and readily available Government Alphabet agencies - such as NSA - FBI - CIA et. al 5G and 6G will make the surveillance system more reliable.
I actually remember this. I only used it a few times, to make designs for my own band's demo CDs, but I always thought it was amazingly cool. It worked really well!
I hear you bro, I converted all my families home movies from VHS to dvds with lightscribe images. it was awesome made 40 dvds total all were very unique. they are holding up to this day.
LightScribe was great!! It was a easy, professional-looking way to label a disc. I haven't had much luck getting adequate drivers for Win7, let alone Win10. Wish it would have survived!
Loved lightscribe. If there was one thing I can say that helped my popularity in high school, it was the fact that I was one of, if not the only person in my class that had one, and made mix CDs for people. Everyone wanted a mix cd from me, so everyone brought me music to burn lightscribed CDs for them. Good times
@@andrew_koala2974 There's so much new technology in the world every day and most of it is garbage. No matter how curious you are, there is a limited number of hours in the day. If your options are between learning a new language and experiencing an entirely new culture of literally billions of people OR looking for stupid niche technology that will 99.99% die off in a month, you aren't "more curious" to waste your time. Stop justifying wasting your life and just admit you're a disappointment. Your parents will still love you.
I had it too, came bundle with my PC from Circuit City when they went out of business, hated it cause of the slow speed plus being so new back then I never knew when it was finished cause I never had something so slow, now I know it was my fault after this video for adding too much at once, for the record I never finished one under 30 minutes back then
Papyrus reeks of incompetence trying too hard. Pretending to be fancy and classy but actually coming off as lame. Comic sans reeks of incompetence unable to take anything seriously. Like a 9 year olds MySpace page or the churches website thrown together by bored housewife who doesn't know what they are doing. It's not the fonts' fault... it is the abuse of them by incompetent people that ruined it. It was mostly solidified by my generation(born in 1984). The internet used to be a very ugly place with no power tools to make professional looking websites,you needed to be able to do it manually from HTML, the tools all made generic repetitive garbage with only a handful of universal fonts, and specific ones repeatedly were used to produce very unprofessional and childish things. To be honest, it was precisely because they were good fonts which caused them to get overused, abused, and ruined for everyone. Loved undertale, btw. I love that they made their personalities related to the negative connotations you get from seeing the fonts :P
During my 2008-2012 high school years, I was the tech-video guy in my small town high school and ran an entertainment company doing DJ'ing & wedding videos. I sold SO many wedding videos with Lightscribe labels on customized color DVD's with matching plastic case. That was sometimes peoples favorite part. I know EXACTLY the smell you're talking about. RIP Lightscribe.
I could listen Alec for 25 minutes even if he was going to talk about spoon. There's an interesting story behind anything which remains untold until Alec comes and fills the gaps. Alec, just talk about anything that comes into your mind, don't be afraid of if people might not be interested, that shouldn't stop you. I remember GFCI breakers video, which I thought I was not interested and I watched all video, turns out I was interested. Now waiting for Arc Fault Breakers and may be whole story behind US split phase system and US home electrical wiring and design. All good wishes!
I had one of these and burnt every disc I had with all my favorite music and labeled them with the cover of the artists in a collage on the face turned out great and still have all the discs
You actually made me sad, becouse LightScribe was one of things I really wanted to use back in the days when I had all the time and no money. Now when I dont have said time, but have the money (and I dont have any use for cd/dvd's) its.. gone. I missed on it. Damn.
As flawed as LightScribe was, I wish it would have stuck around and had some time to improve. It was a really cool tech and despite its problems I actually did use it surprisingly frequently.
Great for running a small business. WAY more professional than paper labels. I still use them, have a stock of burners and disks for when clients need a physical media for proof of purchase (even when buying cloud software).
I assume if it had ever been popular that by now most of the problems would have been ironed out. I *assume* Blu-ray laser diodes are more powerful than DVDs, so faster or higher resolution would be possible. Or of course a second laser could have been added to really speed things up.
Clyde Warden I used discs with a all white label built onto the disc. So it wouldn’t just come off like a paper label. I could pop into my epson printer and print directly onto the disc. I could get discs that were all white on the one side right down to the center hole. They were fantastic. I just don’t burn discs much these day. Generally I’m ripping discs to put on my NAS. But I could really make nice color labels on my disc where it looked professional. They would never peal off.
Guys. My 73 year old neighbor gave me a pack of CD's with music on it for me to listen to. Not only are all the CD's custom lightscribed, but there's custom track lists printed out next to each CD in big letters... and there was a mixtape of country love songs, all of the CD's his wife made for him, who passed a few years ago. I'm crying
I still use LightScribe CDs and DVDs and LOVE the way that they work!! I cannot find a better way to label discs -- paper labels are insane, and my handwriting is poor at its best. Thanks much for such an informative presentation!!
I still have 2 perfectly working Lightscribe drives. Is there a way to burn the images on WIndows 10? (also where the hell do you buy the media nowadays??)
ahums16 They are fine, but somewhat overused, and sometimes the context does not lend itself to such a font. Personnally, i love handwritten fonts, but you have to admit getting a convocation to national exams written in Chiller is disturbing. I mean, were They trying to be creepy? About exams? My old Vista PC had lightscribe, and It kept telling me to Try It, and I kept telling myself "wow this sounds awesome a shame I don't have the disk"
@@wordart_guian No, they are not fine. they are the worst kind of "hand written" fonts: The kind that does not resemble actual hand writing in any way. that's why they are frowned upon. They are horribly designed fonts with unpleasant spacing, line weights, curves and, in Papyrus's case, texture. There are good looking "hand written" fonts out there, loads of them, and designers love them.
@@noalb3108 well, this is possible, but I wouldn't be so categoric with what handwriting should look like. I am fairly positive my 5th grade handwriting did not resemble handwriting tbh.
I ❤️ LightScribe! My handwriting sucks, LightScribe was not a "gimmick" to me. When I started to burn DVDs, LightScribe was an essential thing I had to have on Burners and discs. I still use it now.
I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that, despite these being what we regularly bought in my later high school and early uni years...I never knew you could burn a label on them. I just thought they'd figured out we all know the capacity of a disc, so they'd skip telling us and give us more space to write on.
you also had the blanks with a paper like coating for use in inkjet printers. alec touched on paper labels but that was the adhesive kind and it was hard to apply it perfecly without misalignment and bubles.
@@NicolaiSyvertsen I have a press that lines up the sticker type labels. I also have a Lightscribe, but IDK why I had troubles finding those disks even at peak.
I actually had a spindle of discs like this from Big Lots of all places. CD-R on one side, plain reflective silver on the other (almost looked like a mastered CD on the label side). No idea what brand they were and I never found them again, but they sure were cool while I had them around.
I used to buy 50-disc spindles of red discs from Amazon for my band's demo in 2011. It worked well but I had to burn twice to get decent contrast. A total of ten discs failed to burn on the label side, so I can say 190 copies exist. At least it didn't take much effort to burn two at a time on my machine, but it did shorten the lives of my drives--replaced long ago.
Another point for lightscibe: Let's say you drive in your car and want to change the cd. You'll have to put your interior lights on to see what your past self wrote on it in sharpie. Not so on lightscribe, as the disk is opaque, while the burned in text is transparent, so you could just hold it against a light and read the text right through the disk!!1!
My band burned CD-Rs with Lightscribe labels and used them as the _official limited edition CD release_ of our album (it was good enough, our focus was on vinyl anyway). Our album sleeve design was pale yellow (#FFFFB3 FTW! The _B3_ is an homage to Hammond) with detailing in mostly shades of grey, so Lightscribe discs were a perfect fit! I remember having to burn a bunch of CDs before a gig and forgetting to take into account the time it takes so I ended up bringing everything to work and "scribing" while "working". Still ended up with only about half of the amount of CDs I intended to make. Never got around to doing the rest so I probably have a couple of spindles of unused Lightscribe CD-Rs somewhere. It's a really cool technology, it was just introduced too late, when people were increasingly starting to use MP3 players instead of burning their own mix CDs.
This video truly took me back to when I was a kid! I opened my ancient laptop with a light scribe drive and quickly ran into dependency hell getting label making software working, the good old days of installing software…
@@thatscienceguy9458 Don't bother. These type of people are so stupid that get off on bashing other things people like. Fanboyism at it's best. This is a sign of a low IQ and them being childish. Best to move on as they must hate their life so much they have to make fun of other people and things to make themselves feel better. They just need to grow up and we all know that won't happen. Don't worry they will die alone.
My very first laptop (HP Pavilion) had a LightScribe drive and I loved it. Yup it had a few issues but it did the job. I ended up burning about 120 discs for our school and also LightScribing them all with text etc. Took so long but everyone loved it.
I totally remember LightScribe! I remember the slogan too. I used to be into filmmaking back in elementary school, and I would burn my "movies" onto LightScribe disks.
i always wondered what the "lightScribe" was when i saw the dvd drive on my computer with that icon. and now i know 8 years later. and its impressive, HP does something cool for once
I only remembered about this technology because the disc coincidentally appeared in my wardrobe. Now, how Google knew to recommend this video within hours of finding said disc is beyond me. Oh - the label hasn't faded at all! I guess it did help to use the darkest setting possible...
It could just as well have popped up in front of you and you dismissed it without a second thought, but now that that was a coincidence, you've noticed it.
I was glad to see a three-inch disc in there. I loved those, and used them to give friends smaller items--for only a year or so. It seemed that most people in Taiwan didn't know how to use them or had slot-load drives, etc. At the same time, USB "sticks" surpassed them in storage and they quickly went to the wayside. (I still have my first USB "stick" of 128MB, and it still works!) Great video--as always! Thank you, Technology Connections!
I think the biggest problem with lightscribe is that it launched too late. CDs and DVDs weren't obsolete in 2004, but everybody knew they wouldn't be around too much longer. downloading files and software was already common practice, practical flash drives were already on the market, and Steam had launched that year; heralding the end of physical PC games. people were moving on from disks it simply came too late to have an successful lifespan. if it had launched in 1997 it would have been a MUCH bigger hit
I had a lightscribe drive in one of my PCs growing up and I never had any idea what it meant. It was just the replacement drive my dad happened to slot in at the time. I don't think any of us knew what it did let alone how it worked. Thanks for the video!!
I made so many Lightscribe (think 50+) discs back in the day, I still have a blank stack. They are still sitting in random boxes, wherever they managed to find a home ha! Great video!
I just looked at my DVD burner, and would you believe it has the LightScribe logo right there on the front of it. I had no idea it had this capability!
@JimNS that was such a fail. Never had that issue here luckily. For me they only fail at giving support. I know this because i had free 4 year support from them.
I loved light scribe, it gave cds a unique look and was perfect for impressing customers. It had some neat features like adding stuff afterwards through position recognition. The worst part was probably the bad software and the small amount of marketing. After I knew about light scribe I found a lot devices that supported it but no one knew about it.
I /still/ have a LightScribe drive in my computer, and as long as I can keep it functioning, it will always find its way into any computer I may upgrade to in the future. I've never been able to get any LightScribe disks, but it seems really cool and I hope to be able to get this to work for me sometime. The drive is from my first computer; an old Compaq Presario desktop PC, for anyone who was wondering.
I loved my Lightscribe drive. Even the agonizingly slow print didn't deter me. I'd have loved to have seen an upgrade, that would have cost more, the cut the print time. Or maybe enabled color...
@SteelRodent if it is an inkjet printer that you have, then I know where discs can be obtained from (i have a spindle of 25 inkjet printable CDs, and i know where to get more if needed)
@@WarrenGarabrandt Usually the distance it travels when pressing the eject key (through the help of a spring or magnet) is enough, like it was in this case
As I watched, I thought there was a small piece of plastic on the right that was in the way to pull it straight up, then I saw the text. It had to go back to read it. I was viewing the video on my phone so it was a bit obscure.
Excellent and informative video. I had one of these in a laptop years ago, probably about 2004. Thought it was a great idea, then did one label and realized how incredibly slow it was. Last one I ever made. I felt deceived as nowhere did the marketing give a hint of the time involved. I was not making disks for others, just my own backups, so I did not mind the scribbled text.
We would use Light Scribe discs at work until we finally moved to USB media. Paper labels would eventually come off, so Light Scribe discs were professional looking and were effective for a small company’s software discs. Thanks for producing this video on this great product.
I have a Light scribe CD/DVD burner on my old computer that I bought in 2006. I liked it but rarely used it and probably have more unused light scribe CD's than burned ones laying around somewhere in the basement. Great video!
@@guillaumejoop6437 I currently have a printer that can print onto inkjet printable discs (CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays) and I also have some inkjet printable discs (some CDs, and some M-disc DVDs, i use the M-disc DVDs as data backup discs) The printer I have is even a current model Amazon UK: www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07MM1T12P I dont know if an equivalent model is available in the US
I had a LightScribe drive in a desktop I built. I don't think it was HP brand, something else. But, was kind of cool how you could make your own disk designs. I admit, I probably used it like 10 times in the first few months, then, never used it again. Cool, but, a sharpie does the same in less time (well, not quite the same, not as cool really; but, you know what is on the disk).
A couple years late to comment on this, but I had a LightScribe burner many years ago, back when I got a brand new HP Media Center PC for college. I actually used it quite a bit and was totally about it. Then one day the drive stopped reading and burning and I moved on from the novelty. I'm glad I came across this video and channel as this clarified questions I actually had about this way back when, but long since forgot about. Great stuff!
Lightscribe was awesome, we labeled discs so that the archives looked professional (far better than the sloppy handwriting when using markers and some marker would destroy the discs). The original software was painfully slow but then someone released software for macOS that made the process go twice as fast. I used it happily for years until the discs would mysteriously vanish off the shelves our local stores for months at a time. The online prices were so high that it was cheaper to have them professionally labeled so I sadly donated my Lightscribe drive.
Pioneer had something called labelflash which worked the same way but could also burn a message around the unused edge of a normal disk if you had room after you'd burnt the movie or cd.
Yup. It was actually developed by NEC, but quickly spread amongst their partners Pioneer, Fujitsu and Yamaha. The ability to write on the data side was called a Disc tatoo. Which they called "DiscT@2" for some reason... early 2000s marketing was weird.
Great video - glad you left in the how it works demo. My current Epson printer (ET-7750) allows me to print directly onto Inkjet Printable Discs and even comes with a PC and Mac utility to do so. I have some TDK BD-R's which are white surface inkjet printable and it works really well tbh - and quite quick too.
@Superb Media Content Creator Aren't you a grumpy Gus. What's the matter did someone piss in your cornflakes this morning? Here's a tip that really might help you be more productive. Instead of calling people names and being mean to them when they don't deserve it just take a breath and ignore whatever it was that triggered you and focus on enjoying another video about something you enjoy. Life is to short to waste energy on being angry about things that don't directly affect you and that you have no possible way of changing.
@@lobitome I am pretty sure the original commenter realized that since he even gave thanks for being told how it works. Plus nowhere in this thread were "paper labels" mentioned and both paper labels and inkjet printable discs were mentioned in the video. So I don't see why someone mentioning their experience with label printing technology is an irrelevant thing to mention.
You gotta love it when a customization feature, even a limited one, can be added to a standardized product at little additional cost or complexity. The *possibility* of a nice label just makes it cooler.
@@38911bytefree until you put the AVERY labels in a slot loading player in your car a few times and the paper label started to roll up at the edge resulting in not being able to eject the disk ! Then the fun would begin :-(
My dad bought and installed a lightscribe drive in our family computer around 2005 or so. He had slightly more patience for it than I did, and continued to use it to make labels for disks he burned backups of his digital camera photos onto for years.. I loved the idea, but hated how long it added to the already long process of burning a disk, so I only used it a few times.
Thanks for this awesome video! It certainly brought back fond memories! I had a LightScribe drive and loved it. Back in the day, I made tons of video and audio CDs and DVDs for friends and family. I wanted decorative labels, but somehow I could never get my printer aligned with my label software, so the printouts were always skewed. LightScribe saved me tons of frustration. (Yes, I could have simply used a marker, but for gifts that just looked too tacky to me.) I didn't mind the long print times and occasional snafus because it was still much less hassle than making a bajillion wasted paper labels. Now that CDs/ DVDs are no longer much of a thing, I send my friends and family streaming links instead. Somehow that's just not quite the same, though. PS: Back then I also had a Netbook that I loved. Thanks again for the memories!
Time wasn't a factor for most. Remember, we weren't all used to instant media when this stuff came out. Things took time, both burning the disk, and making the label.
Yep. I used lightscribe for years to burn music cds for my car. I think I stopped using them when I got my first real smartphone that I could put music on and listen to that in my car. Lightscribe was for sure cool though.
While the drives are dirt cheap today, the discs have risen in price dramatically now. I bought some early this year and now they're already faded, ended up getting an inkjet printer that can print to discs instead.
Actually, I haven't seen an inkjet disc printer in at least 10 years. I even have one of the TDK / Casio thermal disc printers (as well as Lightscribe), but have never managed to secure an inkjet one.
@@craigavonvideoWell I got a Canon PIXMA MG7765 on ebay earlier this year, never seen one in a store ever but you can still buy some on ebay. Looks like they already don't sell the printer I bought anymore though.
I picked up a working LightScribe drive at a thrift store, not knowing what it was specifically meant for, I just wanted a working DVD writer. Thanks for telling me what it really is.
Oh yes, I love Lightscribe drives. Used them for edited videos, audio CDs of my son's band etc. The discs looked just so professional then. I didn't mind the 20 or so minutes of burning time. After all I was not into mass production. I still have drives and media for my own consumption, but nowadays I can't even remember whe I last needed to burn a CD or DVD. It's all on online storage now.
Hey, nice video! You mentioned screenprinting, commercially ordering printed discs or labels to stick on, but no mention of inkjet printable media? I burnt a lot of CDs/DVDs and always used inkjet printable media. It is cheap - as are compatible printers. And if you spray glossy lacquer on it afterwards, its not only well protected but looks as good as commercially printed discs.
I wish there was a light scribe capable label flash burner. Adding a company logo "hologram" to the data layer can't hurt, can it? By tweaking certain console based burning programs you can put your data as rings with larger gaps in between on a DVD and then label flash in between. Looks great, is hard to copy and everybody is wondering where the data is located. Very hard to calculate right and you need a lot of fails until you got it right.
I can't believe this! I owned and built many systems as a hobby back then and was not aware this was a feature of lightscibe CD burners back then. How in the world I wasn't aware even after the many many hours spent building and tweeking.
I had a Lightscribe drive in my first laptop. I loved it. A gamechanger was learning that you could run the disc through multiple times to increase the image contrast. Doing it in a photo editor first would be faster though 😂 I still have the laptop and I might even have some blank discs somewhere....
Wow, such an interesting presentation! No idea how I landed here, but very pleased to have a new channel full of useful content! I'm one of those guys who just got stuck with spindles full of lightscribe discs as clients began to demand USB-thumb drives instead. Thank you so much and I can't wait to check out your other video offerings. Thumbs UP of course! New subscriber.
TH-camrs are underappreciated. You have literally documented, researched, and presented tech history in a straightforward and memorable manner whilst also making people laugh with shenanigans.
You should watch Cathode Ray Dude. He does the same stuff.
I think the level of appreciation is apt. He has a million and a half people who want to actively consume his content
i Had a Lightscribe burner in a Compaq Presario. It quickly became a PITA to flip cdr to burn label.
For the record i barely tolerate the shenanigans however clearly i stay for the amazing information, but hey if jesus christ couldn't win everyone over why should he? Guys a good dude, just a bit fuckin annoying.
@@amiga2025 I was so excited when our new computer had one, then immediately disappointed when it turned out all greasy/blurry looking haha. If I knew CDs were so much better than DVDs I might have at least played around with it so much more.
So, something interesting. UCLA researchers are using Lightscribe to print graphene circuit boards on a thin layer of graphene oxide.
Normally, graphene, much more graphene circuit boards, would take forever to make. Then, they discovered, the rust form, graphene oxide, was sensitive to intense light. Then, one of them recalled that Lightscribe is able to print on really thin layers of photosensitive material to make images. They make a thin layer of graphene oxide on top of a Lightscribe disk, Let it dry, and design their circuit boards on something like the Nero essentials
This has to be an episode someday.
I was wondering if somebody would bring that up here, as I was in that lab at that time. LightScribe drives were already hard getting hard to come by when we were working on it, so we had to order "new old stock" drives by the (literal) dozen, since we were burning out about one a week. We were switching over to low-power laser tables by the time I left.
Holy shit, I thought you were trolling newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-researchers-develop-new-technique-243553
@@yoymate6316 I didn't.
I'm wishing for a field trip to see this--as an episode.
A quick explanation as to why the laser diode is lit all the time; what you're seeing when it's not writing is the laser diode in bias mode, laser diodes are very slow (relatively speaking) when switching from off to on, so the diode is kept on at low (bias) power which enables it to switch to writing power much faster.
This channel has the best comments
I was just away to say something similar, that the laser is lit all the time to keep the diode hot as warm up time from "off" state is slow.
I had a Lightscribe drive in high school on my first custom PC. I did a lot of personal movie projects and school video projects. It made it look so much better. The common reaction was, "Whoa! How did you do that?" Considering I still only burned less than 100 DVDs during its entire use, it was still pretty cool. I still have my "first film" with my lightscribe logo on it, even with a fake PG-13 label and everything on it to make it look like a commerical dvd.
Howdy! I feel icky for the use of a particular word in the closing section and I need to say something about it because... icky.
I regret saying that other channels "resort" to outside sponsorship. A much better word would have been "rely". Or even better, I should have not said anything. However channels make themselves possible is fine with me, and there are some people (like Jay Foreman, for example) who make the best and most hilarious sponsorship spots you can imagine. Nonetheless, I find it delightful that with the support of Patreon, this channel can keep going with complete editorial freedom. Especially when it gets all weird and cringey.
That's why I'm always thanking the Patreon crew. It's amazing what people like you can do.
So please pardon the inadvertent shade thrown on others. That was not intended.
Be a nice person. It's always better.
Thank you for reading this mushy comment.
I knew what you meant, but it was good to make it clear anyway since most people on TH-cam (and, well, anywhere) don't usually take the time to practice the Principle of Charity these days. Thanks for another great lesson on technology and its history.
Do you have plans to see up the writing methods to other disc-based media storage ? I'm thinking non-optical methods or so... would be interesting I suppose ! Though I could understand they'd very obscure and very hard to procure.
Cool video, if you need any help with a DVD-R episode then I would love to help, I worked for one of the major manufacturers in the early days to the technology.
I seem to remember a device that would not only burn discs, it also had a printer that would label them with ink. I seem to also remember the ink would get sticky and it just sucked. Would love to see that one shown too.
What's the name of the outro music? I actually kinda like it.
I still use lightscribe all the time when I want to make music CDs from artists that don't release their music on CDs.
It's a lot of fun to design your own CD covers for lightscribe. The trick is to print to the disc 3 times. It may take a long time, but it makes the design a lot bolder and more crisp.
I was wondering if it could be done. I don’t remember much, but I think I had started one once and had to do it over again. I believe it was on the same disc but I just can’t remember.
What software do yo use
@@themessenger6560 Nero 9 Essentials always worked pretty well for me
I’ve never thought of doing it more than once.
@@TheSonicSegaNerd Nero? Wow. I had to check the date on this post. I remember using Nero like 20 years ago.
I loved Lightscrbe and used it all the time back in college. I was so sad when it died out. And yes, I have a vivid recollection of the smell of the new spindles.
i still use all sorts of burners from 1999 till the recent ones made today, and was a big nerd with them but i never heard of lightscribe.
@@NewsBroadcasting they still make CD burners? And why on earth are you still using them?
@@littlejackalo5326 i have an usb one,
i had needed it as reader to instal a program i bought to verify it .. it was only slightly more expensive to buy a writer...
can't say i use it over a couple of times a year... i mean to use it to re-read old dvd's and back them up before they become unreadable...
and laptop have no build in onces any more for years now :).
I had a Lightscribe drive in an HP desktop way back when and got my share of use from it. That being said even if the format had gained more popularity at the time, the profit would have been short-lived given the looming obsolescence of optical storage media. It wasn't the greatest quality for sure, but given LaserJet drives and discs could run 5 times the cost at least, Lightscribe was effective labeling that didn't break the bank.
my dad was very "early adopter" with all kinds of technology and we had a couple lightscribe burners and spindles of discs kicking around for years. as a kid i thought it was the coolest thing ever and i always thought it was a shame the technology just kind of died out. thanks for visiting it and shining some light on what i consider a forgotten gem from the disc burning era!
My dad had at least one too. But he later got something that would do colour more like a regular printer, and not take quite as long. I went to a private school that did a lot of musical programs so he'd record those and then people who wanted to could get a copy of the program to watch at home. I kind of miss those days because now that video files are HD or 4K and much larger, you can't just hand someone an SD card with a 20GB+ video on it, and it's too big to email, so it's like you upload it unlisted to TH-cam, or don't share it at all. I mean, he does still have all that gear, dozens of DVD-Rs and an old PC specifically saved to use apps that don't work on new Mac systems so he could still do it, but a lot of people don't use DVDs anymore. Laptops don't come with disk readers, and a lot of people don't have a DVD player for a TV since everything went to streaming.
@@joyloxI mean, there are blank Blu-Rays but they never had Lightscribe so they'd never look professional unless he invested in a screen printing setup.
"Professional looking labels like this:"
*Shows Papyrus and Comic Sans typefaces*
I love this channel
Right?!? So subtle, so dry. Jokes for those who will get them, and aren't annoying to those who won't.
Pretty sure there were implied air quotes in the way he accentuated the word "professional".
You know, I actually wasn't certain he was kidding bc he mentioned his 'great' CD later again. But I'm glad I found this comment. Phew!
i s t h a t a n u n d e r t a l e r e f e r e n c e
/s
Now that I think of it, that's probably where the names for those Undertale characters came from. I've never played Undertale, but people will not fucking shut up about it.
I am such a moron. I had a light scribe CD burner. I thought it was just a name.
same here
Related to that, I've had a Labelflash DVD/CD drive for years and thought just that.
I'm surprised NEC of all companies made it, this one is kinda versatile though.
I was like this for a good while until I ended up seeing discs with the LightScribe logo on it. I had no clue, I ended up buying it and making a few discs with images.
Im ashamed i never tried it i had tons of CDs.
Same here
Oh wow, I remember having and using lightscribe. Haven’t thought about it in such a long time
it´s one of those thing you were braging about to your friends and then used it twice, realized how expensive it is and then heart that there are regular printer that than do colour pics for much cheaper ... and never used them either :D
You should make a Lightscribe Metal video! I don't know what it would entail, but I'm sure it would be great!
I didn't expect you here XD
@@MK742cz Haha yes that is funny but true. I remember buying an LG drive that had it. Used it about 4 times and never again
My mum's first PC had lightscribe she was excited about it then never actually used it more than once I'm it's lifetime lol
You are right about LightScribe being underappreciated. I bought a bunch of these drives and disks in 2013 for use in my personal lab and when I ran out a few years later, I couldnt find them anymore. I always wondered what happened. I loved Lightscribe and made thousands of CDs and DVDs for coworkers. Thanks for this.
Just buy up old HP laptops with Lightscribe to harvest parts, even got one at home here catching dust.
Put out by your mom definitely.
@@lillexus5589 Can confirm. Have 2 old HP PCs laying around (desktops) and now have a 2007/2010 Lightscribe drive and a newer 2016 regular drive in my large case lol!
See if you can buy a junk lot of old DVD drives. I did that once. Paid about 15 dollars NZD for like 12 or 13 DVD drives of which at least 8 were lightscribe but there were at least 50 drives in there. I recommend going to a e waste or a local second hand or landfill store (If you have one)
Me and a friend both had LightScribe burners. He'd use it constantly to label pira... back-up copies.
I was fine with using a marker. Never used the thing.
porating is ok in my book
I hate how people still think "piracy" (file sharing) is somehow "bad" and "dodgy". This view is outdated in our modern society.
9:09
*uses Papyrus and Comic Sans*
"and now I think that's a delightful design, worthy of a LightScribe label."
Should've used the gnome
Namelessnake yessss.
You're gonna have a bad time
Geez, Comic Sans is my favorite font for disk labels. Nice clean look, but not too formal, nor goofy or distracting. I only use it for disk titles though, and typically just use either one of the common sans-serif (Ariel or Calibri) or serif (Times Roman) for 'body text'. thus conforming to 'good practice' as I learned it whilst studying editing and professional page layout many moons ago.
At least he didn’t use comic papyrus. That would be truly abysmal.
Used to use LightScribe to label DVD for clients. Loved it! Looked a lot more professional then a sharpie or a dodgy paper label.
My sister messed with those full sized stickers that covered the whole disk.
I had a tower with 5 or 6 burners on it. Charged a buck for each disk, buck fity for a DVD. Back in the day when people would keep giving mix disks to each other, I made a solid return on that tower.
It was a great idea that I wished would have stuck around for a while. I still occasionally will (try if it completes) burn a custom CD for road trips or such. Wish they would have had Blu-ray discs for lightscribe. I would use it more frequently. Still have a spindle of cd's & dvd's for lightscribe, and my portable blu-ray burner actually does lightscribe.
As an audio mastering engineer I loved LightScribe discs. Much better than paper stick on or a Sharpie when tagging a reference CDR for a customer. Really looked professional.
I love this dude. He's so well-spoken and says the things I want to hear.
Big gay al then
I had one of these and made my girl friend a music mix and lightscribed the label. She is now my wife, it worked. Lol.
Gotta look for an old LightScribe drive in my wardrobe and keep it safe and ready for a similar need :D
@Menschen Gegen 5G well, the girls of my age still have got some resistance to mobile devices :)
I thought sharing mix tapes was just a meme haha
@@wizard7314 It wasn't a meme back then. This was when MP3 was first coming out, so CD was still a big thing.
@Newsbender She didn't have a smart phone then. Only a flip phone. Those were the good days. Lol
The phrase "new old stock" will always make me think of Techmoan.
Well he certainly is new old stock :)
It makes me think of my russian vacuum tube dealer
I think of NOS car parts, Thankfully, NOS computer gear is smaller, leading up to a SOMEWHAT better chance of survival.
I'm familiar with the phrase from the guitar/bass amp tube market, people buying ancient but still new in box tubes from like Russian aircraft and stuff because they are so reliable, lol.
I pulled out my old Lightscribe and I thought "I bet someone like Technology Connections made a TH-cam video about this". You didn't disappoint :)
I actually had a job where we needed to provide 5~10 copies of custom professional DVDs to clients every week or so - LightScribe was definitely our preferred label option. Because of the time they took, we'd print them as soon as we possibly could, typically several days before the DVD content itself was ready to be burned. We had a couple LightScribe burners on computers that were otherwise being used, so we would simply start the printing process for a disc when we were getting ready to go to lunch or go home for the day. Due to typically 1 or 2 bad label burns, per client, we also ended up needing to print more labeled discs than we actually needed, which added to costs, but was still significantly less costly than other professional-looking options.
For our purposes, LightScribe was almost perfect, but if you needed more than about 10 good labels a week, there were definitely better options!
I only found out toward the end of my time in that job that you could re-burn them, but it helped on several occasions and was just downright pretty cool to do (I'm not sure why it made me happy, but it did).
Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Fun fact: If you leave a lightscribe disc in the sunlight too long, they all end up with that picture from 4:17
lmfao
Joshua Pearce hahahahaahahahahahahaha
Coffee, meet monitor.
LOL
*_THAT IS A CURSED IMAGE YOU MUST RUN BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE_*
all my downloaded Wii ISOs are on lightscribe DVD''s and I burned a cover for all. They look real nice and I miss the damned thing!
Same for my PS2 erm.. backups.
@@ez45 backups lol
This is something I hadn't thought of. I should've used that for my Dreamcast backups. They are backups, I have the original discs.
I did the same too!
“Back when Apple had optical drives and headphone jacks” ouch!
Now it's just a fact of life that modern smartphones are going to require either bluetooth or a dongle
@@brendancross2767 According to who? Over 99% of phones on the market currently have built-in headphones jacks. Phones are used primarily as multimedia devices.
@@chrismanuel9768 Ok I stand corrected, the majority of flagship phones and all but one pocketable devices from apple
@@brendancross2767
Bluetooth as a subversive mechanism allowing inter-device transmission of data
scavenged from users devices including a various assortment of 'Smart' devices
and being ultimately relayed to APPLE - GOOGLE - AMAZON - and readily available
Government Alphabet agencies - such as NSA - FBI - CIA et. al
5G and 6G will make the surveillance system more reliable.
@@andrew_koala2974 what
I actually remember this. I only used it a few times, to make designs for my own band's demo CDs, but I always thought it was amazingly cool. It worked really well!
Did you use Papyrus too?
Yes
Same here. Did our very first EP demo CDs. It was a cool feature.
Also, picking a silver tone of the data layer contributed to a great demo CD.
one of my favorite lost memories was a lightscribed picture of my dad and i on a mixtape he burned me.
edit: my dad found it !
Mixdisc?? Haha!! I say tape all the time without thinking about it! Good job Dad! I’m sure he liked what you did with the program
I hear you bro, I converted all my families home movies from VHS to dvds with lightscribe images. it was awesome made 40 dvds total all were very unique. they are holding up to this day.
@@JV-wl6ex people say mixtape for CDs still, hell even playlists
YESSS that's beautiful, that's such a dad thing
We need an Imgur link, I do believe.
LightScribe was great!!
It was a easy, professional-looking way to label a disc.
I haven't had much luck getting adequate drivers for Win7, let alone Win10.
Wish it would have survived!
Loved lightscribe. If there was one thing I can say that helped my popularity in high school, it was the fact that I was one of, if not the only person in my class that had one, and made mix CDs for people.
Everyone wanted a mix cd from me, so everyone brought me music to burn lightscribed CDs for them. Good times
it’s bad enough you were engaging in copyright infringement, I hope you weren’t profiting from it as well. 🤨
@@dennisthemenace3695 you be quiet 🤨
Man why do I only learn about cool things after they’re not a thing anymore?!
Samuel Charpentier
Answer: Because you do not make an effort to read and study,
and you lack the curiosity factor. Simple as that.
@@andrew_koala2974 There's so much new technology in the world every day and most of it is garbage. No matter how curious you are, there is a limited number of hours in the day. If your options are between learning a new language and experiencing an entirely new culture of literally billions of people OR looking for stupid niche technology that will 99.99% die off in a month, you aren't "more curious" to waste your time.
Stop justifying wasting your life and just admit you're a disappointment. Your parents will still love you.
@@andrew_koala2974 ratio
Because cool things stop being cool once they are normal.
Touchscreens would have been the most awesome thing in 1970. Now it's normal
@@andrew_koala2974 ironic
I loved lightscribe. I was the only person I know that used it though.
Probably why it is gone sadly.
Me too
I’ve had computers with light scribe and never knew what it was or looked into it. I wish now I had looked into it.
Me too! sadly expensive now to get the discs
I had it too, came bundle with my PC from Circuit City when they went out of business, hated it cause of the slow speed plus being so new back then I never knew when it was finished cause I never had something so slow, now I know it was my fault after this video for adding too much at once, for the record I never finished one under 30 minutes back then
me 2
Should I ironically use Papyrus and Comic sans in the video?
93% Of course
4% Good grief, no
3% What do you mean, ironically?
I've always liked Papyrus. Fight me!
Y not both?
laughingsquid.com/comic-papyrus
@@tristan6509 Well I'm going to use that for everything now! :)
@@_Piers_ wish there were one with impact also included tho
Papyrus reeks of incompetence trying too hard. Pretending to be fancy and classy but actually coming off as lame.
Comic sans reeks of incompetence unable to take anything seriously. Like a 9 year olds MySpace page or the churches website thrown together by bored housewife who doesn't know what they are doing.
It's not the fonts' fault... it is the abuse of them by incompetent people that ruined it. It was mostly solidified by my generation(born in 1984). The internet used to be a very ugly place with no power tools to make professional looking websites,you needed to be able to do it manually from HTML, the tools all made generic repetitive garbage with only a handful of universal fonts, and specific ones repeatedly were used to produce very unprofessional and childish things.
To be honest, it was precisely because they were good fonts which caused them to get overused, abused, and ruined for everyone.
Loved undertale, btw. I love that they made their personalities related to the negative connotations you get from seeing the fonts :P
During my 2008-2012 high school years, I was the tech-video guy in my small town high school and ran an entertainment company doing DJ'ing & wedding videos. I sold SO many wedding videos with Lightscribe labels on customized color DVD's with matching plastic case. That was sometimes peoples favorite part. I know EXACTLY the smell you're talking about. RIP Lightscribe.
I could listen Alec for 25 minutes even if he was going to talk about spoon. There's an interesting story behind anything which remains untold until Alec comes and fills the gaps. Alec, just talk about anything that comes into your mind, don't be afraid of if people might not be interested, that shouldn't stop you. I remember GFCI breakers video, which I thought I was not interested and I watched all video, turns out I was interested. Now waiting for Arc Fault Breakers and may be whole story behind US split phase system and US home electrical wiring and design. All good wishes!
I had one of these and burnt every disc I had with all my favorite music and labeled them with the cover of the artists in a collage on the face turned out great and still have all the discs
You actually made me sad, becouse LightScribe was one of things I really wanted to use back in the days when I had all the time and no money. Now when I dont have said time, but have the money (and I dont have any use for cd/dvd's) its.. gone. I missed on it. Damn.
Almost all of the computers we had growing up had light scribe, I loved the idea of custom labeling all my cds.... never used it even once.
Oh man! I remember 2007 😍 I was one of the only people in my high-school class with light scribe it blew some minds for sure
Cameron D.F Chisholm Ditto, only I did the same thing 4 years later.
As flawed as LightScribe was, I wish it would have stuck around and had some time to improve. It was a really cool tech and despite its problems I actually did use it surprisingly frequently.
I still have one blank lightscribe cd. I remember taking a VERY long time to draw the picture onto it.
Great for running a small business. WAY more professional than paper labels. I still use them, have a stock of burners and disks for when clients need a physical media for proof of purchase (even when buying cloud software).
@@ClydeWarden that's nice touch. I would appreciate effort if I'd see something like this.
I assume if it had ever been popular that by now most of the problems would have been ironed out.
I *assume* Blu-ray laser diodes are more powerful than DVDs, so faster or higher resolution would be possible. Or of course a second laser could have been added to really speed things up.
Clyde Warden
I used discs with a all white label built onto the disc. So it wouldn’t just come off like a paper label. I could pop into my epson printer and print directly onto the disc. I could get discs that were all white on the one side right down to the center hole. They were fantastic. I just don’t burn discs much these day. Generally I’m ripping discs to put on my NAS. But I could really make nice color labels on my disc where it looked professional. They would never peal off.
Worst thing is when the Nero software crashes 15 minutes in to a Lightscribe label burn!
Fuck. You just brought back my ptsd.
That happened to me when I was trying to make a copy of my violin practice audio
Goddamn it I felt that comment
I was a computer nublet who talked his parents into switching from Windows to Ubuntu.
I know today why I could never get my lightscribe to work :(
fuck I hated Nero. I had completely erased that garbage software from my memory until I read this comment
Guys. My 73 year old neighbor gave me a pack of CD's with music on it for me to listen to.
Not only are all the CD's custom lightscribed, but there's custom track lists printed out next to each CD in big letters... and there was a mixtape of country love songs, all of the CD's his wife made for him, who passed a few years ago. I'm crying
Me, when I grill a steak:
**Burn, flip, burn**
CD’s are round. Burgers are round. Also about the same size. Coincidence?
@@JohannGambolputty22 **x-files music**
@@JohannGambolputty22 Probably what they were hoping to connect. Marketing just failed to get the message out there.
@@JohannGambolputty22 instructions unclear burger stuck in cd player.
Matt the 2nd, Call the Helpdesk
I still use LightScribe CDs and DVDs and LOVE the way that they work!! I cannot find a better way to label discs -- paper labels are insane, and my handwriting is poor at its best.
Thanks much for such an informative presentation!!
I still have 2 perfectly working Lightscribe drives. Is there a way to burn the images on WIndows 10? (also where the hell do you buy the media nowadays??)
@@fish_bacon I buy the media on ebay. And as far as writing from Windows 10, I typically use other software.
Me: Did he seriously just write that in papyrus
*writes the next line in comic sans"
Me: OH GOOD it's on purpose
haha had the same thought :D
Why are those two fonts universally bashed? :P
I've always heard it for comic sans but never heard any context.
ahums16 They are fine, but somewhat overused, and sometimes the context does not lend itself to such a font.
Personnally, i love handwritten fonts, but you have to admit getting a convocation to national exams written in Chiller is disturbing. I mean, were They trying to be creepy? About exams?
My old Vista PC had lightscribe, and It kept telling me to Try It, and I kept telling myself "wow this sounds awesome a shame I don't have the disk"
@@wordart_guian No, they are not fine. they are the worst kind of "hand written" fonts: The kind that does not resemble actual hand writing in any way. that's why they are frowned upon. They are horribly designed fonts with unpleasant spacing, line weights, curves and, in Papyrus's case, texture. There are good looking "hand written" fonts out there, loads of them, and designers love them.
@@noalb3108 well, this is possible, but I wouldn't be so categoric with what handwriting should look like.
I am fairly positive my 5th grade handwriting did not resemble handwriting tbh.
I find it funny that "smell-o-vision" removes the "tele" or "far" part from television but keeps the "vision"-part, the sense it's not about :D
lol, "telesmell"
Telescent
I ❤️ LightScribe! My handwriting sucks, LightScribe was not a "gimmick" to me. When I started to burn DVDs, LightScribe was an essential thing I had to have on Burners and discs. I still use it now.
I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that, despite these being what we regularly bought in my later high school and early uni years...I never knew you could burn a label on them. I just thought they'd figured out we all know the capacity of a disc, so they'd skip telling us and give us more space to write on.
you also had the blanks with a paper like coating for use in inkjet printers. alec touched on paper labels but that was the adhesive kind and it was hard to apply it perfecly without misalignment and bubles.
@@NicolaiSyvertsen I have a press that lines up the sticker type labels. I also have a Lightscribe, but IDK why I had troubles finding those disks even at peak.
I actually had a spindle of discs like this from Big Lots of all places. CD-R on one side, plain reflective silver on the other (almost looked like a mastered CD on the label side). No idea what brand they were and I never found them again, but they sure were cool while I had them around.
I used to buy 50-disc spindles of red discs from Amazon for my band's demo in 2011. It worked well but I had to burn twice to get decent contrast. A total of ten discs failed to burn on the label side, so I can say 190 copies exist. At least it didn't take much effort to burn two at a time on my machine, but it did shorten the lives of my drives--replaced long ago.
Another point for lightscibe:
Let's say you drive in your car and want to change the cd. You'll have to put your interior lights on to see what your past self wrote on it in sharpie. Not so on lightscribe, as the disk is opaque, while the burned in text is transparent, so you could just hold it against a light and read the text right through the disk!!1!
And have a heads on collision in the process.
@@TheWeepingCorpse yes, one hopes they pulled over first. 😏
It wouldn’t be 2006 if it wasn’t comic sans
*Megalovania intensifies*
+Lucas Croft
...
*_MEGALOVANIA INTENSIFIES_*
Why does everyone hate Comic Sans???
XtremeBudgetMusician I for one don't hate It. Only sometimes the context doesn't lends itself to the use of a light-hearted looking font.
Body Massage Machine GO!!!
My band burned CD-Rs with Lightscribe labels and used them as the _official limited edition CD release_ of our album (it was good enough, our focus was on vinyl anyway). Our album sleeve design was pale yellow (#FFFFB3 FTW! The _B3_ is an homage to Hammond) with detailing in mostly shades of grey, so Lightscribe discs were a perfect fit! I remember having to burn a bunch of CDs before a gig and forgetting to take into account the time it takes so I ended up bringing everything to work and "scribing" while "working". Still ended up with only about half of the amount of CDs I intended to make. Never got around to doing the rest so I probably have a couple of spindles of unused Lightscribe CD-Rs somewhere.
It's a really cool technology, it was just introduced too late, when people were increasingly starting to use MP3 players instead of burning their own mix CDs.
Man, you just don’t know how badly I want that CD with your face on it.
This video truly took me back to when I was a kid!
I opened my ancient laptop with a light scribe drive and quickly ran into dependency hell getting label making software working, the good old days of installing software…
I used this in the Army for cheap back ups, was amazing, looked clean and nice.
I can't believe that at all
Why? this isn't weird or unbelievable.
Is it impossible for someone to have been in the army?
“and headphone jacks “ I love your brand of rapid fire passive aggressive abuse
Sole reason I upvoted this video.
( I don't have the habit of upvoting )
@@phs125 So you just upvote because you hate. Shows what type of a person you are. You really should go get a life.
@@thatscienceguy9458 Don't bother. These type of people are so stupid that get off on bashing other things people like. Fanboyism at it's best. This is a sign of a low IQ and them being childish. Best to move on as they must hate their life so much they have to make fun of other people and things to make themselves feel better. They just need to grow up and we all know that won't happen. Don't worry they will die alone.
@@thatsciencedude4552 but somehow bashing others for their comment is not childish?
Appreciate the humour and move on..
@@thatscienceguy9458 Wow, that came out of left field. Do you always make broad assumptions and generalizations?
Still have some lightscribed disks. I liked the tech. 😥
would you like more.
@@michaelmiller367 I would!
Me too :)
Same here....
It was the Rube Goldberg way of labeling a disc.
My very first laptop (HP Pavilion) had a LightScribe drive and I loved it. Yup it had a few issues but it did the job. I ended up burning about 120 discs for our school and also LightScribing them all with text etc. Took so long but everyone loved it.
I was a DJ back when using CDs to DJ was standard. Lightscribe was a Godsend back then.
I totally remember LightScribe! I remember the slogan too. I used to be into filmmaking back in elementary school, and I would burn my "movies" onto LightScribe disks.
I was using my Lightscribe burner almost daily! I loved it!
i always wondered what the "lightScribe" was when i saw the dvd drive on my computer with that icon. and now i know 8 years later. and its impressive, HP does something cool for once
I only remembered about this technology because the disc coincidentally appeared in my wardrobe. Now, how Google knew to recommend this video within hours of finding said disc is beyond me. Oh - the label hasn't faded at all! I guess it did help to use the darkest setting possible...
Do you have an Android phone and possibly said "Oh Cool! A light-scribe disc!" in the same room? ;)
@@thaghost909 Google *_may_* have heard me say that... 😅🤷♂️
It could just as well have popped up in front of you and you dismissed it without a second thought, but now that that was a coincidence, you've noticed it.
Take the red pill
You would be suprised at the amount of "coincidences" happen everyday. Now picking most of them up depends on how psychotic you are !
I was glad to see a three-inch disc in there. I loved those, and used them to give friends smaller items--for only a year or so. It seemed that most people in Taiwan didn't know how to use them or had slot-load drives, etc. At the same time, USB "sticks" surpassed them in storage and they quickly went to the wayside. (I still have my first USB "stick" of 128MB, and it still works!) Great video--as always! Thank you, Technology Connections!
I think the biggest problem with lightscribe is that it launched too late. CDs and DVDs weren't obsolete in 2004, but everybody knew they wouldn't be around too much longer. downloading files and software was already common practice, practical flash drives were already on the market, and Steam had launched that year; heralding the end of physical PC games.
people were moving on from disks
it simply came too late to have an successful lifespan. if it had launched in 1997 it would have been a MUCH bigger hit
I had a lightscribe drive in one of my PCs growing up and I never had any idea what it meant. It was just the replacement drive my dad happened to slot in at the time. I don't think any of us knew what it did let alone how it worked. Thanks for the video!!
I made so many Lightscribe (think 50+) discs back in the day, I still have a blank stack. They are still sitting in random boxes, wherever they managed to find a home ha! Great video!
I just looked at my DVD burner, and would you believe it has the LightScribe logo right there on the front of it. I had no idea it had this capability!
@@H3wastooshort Fake hacker.
I don't but my drive can do the same thing.
@JimNS that was such a fail. Never had that issue here luckily. For me they only fail at giving support. I know this because i had free 4 year support from them.
I have a blu-ray burner that even has the Lightscribe logo on it!
I loved light scribe, it gave cds a unique look and was perfect for impressing customers. It had some neat features like adding stuff afterwards through position recognition.
The worst part was probably the bad software and the small amount of marketing. After I knew about light scribe I found a lot devices that supported it but no one knew about it.
I /still/ have a LightScribe drive in my computer, and as long as I can keep it functioning, it will always find its way into any computer I may upgrade to in the future. I've never been able to get any LightScribe disks, but it seems really cool and I hope to be able to get this to work for me sometime. The drive is from my first computer; an old Compaq Presario desktop PC, for anyone who was wondering.
I loved my Lightscribe drive. Even the agonizingly slow print didn't deter me. I'd have loved to have seen an upgrade, that would have cost more, the cut the print time. Or maybe enabled color...
@SteelRodent if it is an inkjet printer that you have, then I know where discs can be obtained from (i have a spindle of 25 inkjet printable CDs, and i know where to get more if needed)
I just wish it had a more powerful laser so it could burn a larger area. I would have happily sacrificed resolution for burn speed
9:18 "You pulled the tray out... why?" Made me laugh so hard! XD
It has to open a certain distance and then close again before it will recognize that a new disc has been inserted and try to read it.
@@WarrenGarabrandt Usually the distance it travels when pressing the eject key (through the help of a spring or magnet) is enough, like it was in this case
As I watched, I thought there was a small piece of plastic on the right that was in the way to pull it straight up, then I saw the text. It had to go back to read it. I was viewing the video on my phone so it was a bit obscure.
Excellent and informative video. I had one of these in a laptop years ago, probably about 2004. Thought it was a great idea, then did one label and realized how incredibly slow it was. Last one I ever made. I felt deceived as nowhere did the marketing give a hint of the time involved. I was not making disks for others, just my own backups, so I did not mind the scribbled text.
I remember my dad making these for us in the 90s, I never really knew how they worked though, thanks for the nostalgia!
I made a mix CD for my gf years ago. I Light Scribed a photo of her and I together on the face of it. It looked cool as Hell.
Bet you got some special treatment after that one
@@unnamedchannel1237He's probably still getting that special treatment to this day except now she owns him (speaking metaphorically) lol
Danfuerth Gillis only if a shovel was involved ?
@@unnamedchannel1237 LMFAO marriage is a no win situation, you know concessions have to be made and it's always on one side......lol
@@danfuerthgillis4483 that's a lopsided perspective. A sensible man wouldn't marry if all it was about was him making concessions lol
Good to hear that you appreciate the smells. As a species, we should embrace smells more.
Don't embrace the bad smells. That defeats the purpose of having an olfactory warning.
Love the Papyrus/Comic Sans combo! :D
but what about
c o m i c p a p y r u s laughingsquid.com/comic-papyrus/
+@@hecko-yes just kill me now
Undertaile references? Lol
😂😂😂
Wait, was that intentional? I thought it was just a coincidence.
We would use Light Scribe discs at work until we finally moved to USB media. Paper labels would eventually come off, so Light Scribe discs were professional looking and were effective for a small company’s software discs. Thanks for producing this video on this great product.
I have a Light scribe CD/DVD burner on my old computer that I bought in 2006. I liked it but rarely used it and probably have more unused light scribe CD's than burned ones laying around somewhere in the basement. Great video!
Aww! You don't have a vid about the inkjet printable CD's!
I used to love running my epson in CD-mode. It was fast too! and full color!
Wow, didn't know of that. Well I knew there was some kind of device allowing it cause duh, but not for the general market
@@guillaumejoop6437 I currently have a printer that can print onto inkjet printable discs (CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays)
and I also have some inkjet printable discs (some CDs, and some M-disc DVDs, i use the M-disc DVDs as data backup discs)
The printer I have is even a current model
Amazon UK: www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07MM1T12P
I dont know if an equivalent model is available in the US
I had a LightScribe drive in a desktop I built. I don't think it was HP brand, something else. But, was kind of cool how you could make your own disk designs. I admit, I probably used it like 10 times in the first few months, then, never used it again. Cool, but, a sharpie does the same in less time (well, not quite the same, not as cool really; but, you know what is on the disk).
still use my lightscribe drive, and it makes its way into each build. My original drive is still going strong
A couple years late to comment on this, but I had a LightScribe burner many years ago, back when I got a brand new HP Media Center PC for college. I actually used it quite a bit and was totally about it. Then one day the drive stopped reading and burning and I moved on from the novelty. I'm glad I came across this video and channel as this clarified questions I actually had about this way back when, but long since forgot about. Great stuff!
Lightscribe was awesome, we labeled discs so that the archives looked professional (far better than the sloppy handwriting when using markers and some marker would destroy the discs). The original software was painfully slow but then someone released software for macOS that made the process go twice as fast. I used it happily for years until the discs would mysteriously vanish off the shelves our local stores for months at a time. The online prices were so high that it was cheaper to have them professionally labeled so I sadly donated my Lightscribe drive.
Pioneer had something called labelflash which worked the same way but could also burn a message around the unused edge of a normal disk if you had room after you'd burnt the movie or cd.
He mentions this during the end credits.
Which software did you need to use Labelflash?
@@charlesferdinand422 LIM.exe
Yup. It was actually developed by NEC, but quickly spread amongst their partners Pioneer, Fujitsu and Yamaha.
The ability to write on the data side was called a Disc tatoo. Which they called "DiscT@2" for some reason... early 2000s marketing was weird.
Great video - glad you left in the how it works demo. My current Epson printer (ET-7750) allows me to print directly onto Inkjet Printable Discs and even comes with a PC and Mac utility to do so. I have some TDK BD-R's which are white surface inkjet printable and it works really well tbh - and quite quick too.
@Superb Media Content Creator Aren't you a grumpy Gus. What's the matter did someone piss in your cornflakes this morning? Here's a tip that really might help you be more productive. Instead of calling people names and being mean to them when they don't deserve it just take a breath and ignore whatever it was that triggered you and focus on enjoying another video about something you enjoy. Life is to short to waste energy on being angry about things that don't directly affect you and that you have no possible way of changing.
This is about lightscribe, not paper labels.
@@lobitome I am pretty sure the original commenter realized that since he even gave thanks for being told how it works. Plus nowhere in this thread were "paper labels" mentioned and both paper labels and inkjet printable discs were mentioned in the video. So I don't see why someone mentioning their experience with label printing technology is an irrelevant thing to mention.
same with a legendary canon photo printer of mine that i can't remember its model name for the time being.
You gotta love it when a customization feature, even a limited one, can be added to a standardized product at little additional cost or complexity. The *possibility* of a nice label just makes it cooler.
When making cd labels nothing beat a xy plotter armed with a sharpie, at least until faculty staff found out...
Or AVERY labels .... and you are done.
@@38911bytefree until you put the AVERY labels in a slot loading player in your car a few times and the paper label started to roll up at the edge resulting in not being able to eject the disk ! Then the fun would begin :-(
Now that's a good one!
My dad bought and installed a lightscribe drive in our family computer around 2005 or so. He had slightly more patience for it than I did, and continued to use it to make labels for disks he burned backups of his digital camera photos onto for years.. I loved the idea, but hated how long it added to the already long process of burning a disk, so I only used it a few times.
Thanks for this awesome video! It certainly brought back fond memories!
I had a LightScribe drive and loved it. Back in the day, I made tons of video and audio CDs and DVDs for friends and family. I wanted decorative labels, but somehow I could never get my printer aligned with my label software, so the printouts were always skewed. LightScribe saved me tons of frustration. (Yes, I could have simply used a marker, but for gifts that just looked too tacky to me.)
I didn't mind the long print times and occasional snafus because it was still much less hassle than making a bajillion wasted paper labels. Now that CDs/ DVDs are no longer much of a thing, I send my friends and family streaming links instead. Somehow that's just not quite the same, though.
PS: Back then I also had a Netbook that I loved. Thanks again for the memories!
Happy to see that the thumbnail is actually extracted from the video.
Time wasn't a factor for most. Remember, we weren't all used to instant media when this stuff came out. Things took time, both burning the disk, and making the label.
Yep. I used lightscribe for years to burn music cds for my car. I think I stopped using them when I got my first real smartphone that I could put music on and listen to that in my car. Lightscribe was for sure cool though.
I had one of these and while it was slow and the quality wasn't great I loved it and I used it a lot
While the drives are dirt cheap today, the discs have risen in price dramatically now. I bought some early this year and now they're already faded, ended up getting an inkjet printer that can print to discs instead.
Actually, I haven't seen an inkjet disc printer in at least 10 years. I even have one of the TDK / Casio thermal disc printers (as well as Lightscribe), but have never managed to secure an inkjet one.
@@craigavonvideoWell I got a Canon PIXMA MG7765 on ebay earlier this year, never seen one in a store ever but you can still buy some on ebay.
Looks like they already don't sell the printer I bought anymore though.
I picked up a working LightScribe drive at a thrift store, not knowing what it was specifically meant for, I just wanted a working DVD writer.
Thanks for telling me what it really is.
Oh yes, I love Lightscribe drives. Used them for edited videos, audio CDs of my son's band etc. The discs looked just so professional then. I didn't mind the 20 or so minutes of burning time. After all I was not into mass production. I still have drives and media for my own consumption, but nowadays I can't even remember whe I last needed to burn a CD or DVD. It's all on online storage now.
Good point!
Hey, nice video! You mentioned screenprinting, commercially ordering printed discs or labels to stick on, but no mention of inkjet printable media? I burnt a lot of CDs/DVDs and always used inkjet printable media. It is cheap - as are compatible printers. And if you spray glossy lacquer on it afterwards, its not only well protected but looks as good as commercially printed discs.
I wish there was a light scribe capable label flash burner. Adding a company logo "hologram" to the data layer can't hurt, can it?
By tweaking certain console based burning programs you can put your data as rings with larger gaps in between on a DVD and then label flash in between. Looks great, is hard to copy and everybody is wondering where the data is located. Very hard to calculate right and you need a lot of fails until you got it right.
That sounds awesome. I want to try it now but I haven't had a reason to use a burner in years.
I can't believe this! I owned and built many systems as a hobby back then and was not aware this was a feature of lightscibe CD burners back then. How in the world I wasn't aware even after the many many hours spent building and tweeking.
I had a Lightscribe drive in my first laptop. I loved it. A gamechanger was learning that you could run the disc through multiple times to increase the image contrast. Doing it in a photo editor first would be faster though 😂 I still have the laptop and I might even have some blank discs somewhere....
Wow, such an interesting presentation! No idea how I landed here, but very pleased to have a new channel full of useful content! I'm one of those guys who just got stuck with spindles full of lightscribe discs as clients began to demand USB-thumb drives instead. Thank you so much and I can't wait to check out your other video offerings. Thumbs UP of course! New subscriber.
I loved LightScribe when it came out. I was very sad when the tech died.