LightScribe

» see lightscribe.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

An HP engineer named Daryl Anderson came up with it and a colleague, Makarand Gore, worked out the chemistry of the coating that made it possible. Hewlett-Packard put the result on a stand at CES in January 2004. The pitch was short: the drive that burns your data can burn the label too, so stop printing sticky labels and stop writing on discs with a marker.

What you needed was a drive with the feature and a disc with the coating, which is where the economics started going wrong. LightScribe media had a reactive dye layer across the whole label side and cost a multiple of a plain blank. The drive side spread fast enough: by 2007 or so a LightScribe burner was ordinary equipment in a desktop or a laptop, and the software to drive it shipped with the machine.

The blank disc was how files moved in Turkey for most of that decade. You had a DVD burner and you bought spindles, and what went on the top of a disc was a few words in marker, because a few words in marker is free and takes two seconds. LightScribe media was never priced for that. It landed here as a feature that was present on the drive and never used, which is the quietest way a format can fail: not rejected, just not worth the premium on the disc.

~ the record ~

~ how the burn worked ~

The laser was the same 780 nanometer infrared one that wrote the data, pointed at the other side of the disc. The label surface held a dye that darkened where the beam hit, and the drive worked outward from the hub in concentric circles. A code molded into the center of every LightScribe disc gave the drive a rotational reference, so you could put a disc back in weeks later and burn more onto the same label without the second pass landing crooked.

Everything else about it was a compromise. The image was monochrome, sepia at first and later available in a handful of other single colors under the 1.2 specification, and a full-coverage label took considerably longer than burning the data. Nothing could be erased, only added to. Labels faded in sunlight and heat, and discs stored badly sometimes grew a white crystalline powder on the label side that wiped off with a damp cloth and that nobody ever satisfactorily explained.

~ the rival nobody needed ~

Labelflash turned up in 2005 from Yamaha and Fujifilm, doing the same job by burning into a dye layer beneath the disc surface rather than on top of it, in blue. It was incompatible with LightScribe at the drive and at the media, so a buyer picking a burner was also picking which expensive blank discs to buy for as long as that drive lasted. The two formats split a small market between them, and neither one ever became the default.

~ the page in the folder called EOL ~

The reason was that the optical drive was leaving the computer. Laptops got thin and software moved to download, and photographs went to the phone and then to somebody's cloud. By June 2013 HP had announced it was finished with LightScribe drives, and Samsung and LiteOn said the same, leaving LG as the last manufacturer still making them for a while.

The website went the same year and the archive dates it more precisely than the encyclopedias do. On 2 March 2013 lightscribe.com is still the full marketing site at 5.7 kilobytes. By 23 November it is 1.4 kilobytes whose entire body is one image, loaded from a directory named EOL, under a 2013 Hewlett-Packard copyright line. Wikipedia puts the closure on 26 November, three days after the archive already has the end-of-life page serving. The notice, rendered as a picture so that nobody could search it, thanked you for your interest and said the software could be found on a number of public websites. One of those, lightscribesoftware.org, has been handing out the installers since 2014.

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