Scribing the light fantastic
The humble CD-ROM drive has certainly had a number of enhancements made to it. Nowadays, toasting anything from 700MB, write-once CD’s to dual-layer DVD’s and DVD RAM disks is no issue. And all that in one drive! The latest upgrade to my aged home PC is the LG GSA-H20L super multi DVD-RW drive.
Disk support is impressive, with every major format being supported: CD-R/RW, DVD-R/-R DL/-RW/+R/+R DL/+RW/RAM read and write. Being an IDE device, installation is very simple. The necessary cables are included and the instructions are reasonable. One unfortunate issue is that Nero has to be re-installed to ensure all necessary components of the software register the drive’s capabilities (no better time to get hold of the very latest version). The express edition is included with the drive, but sadly no sample media.
The one feature that makes this drive interesting is Lightscribe – the ability to turn a suitable recordable disk over and write an image to it. Currently, the disks are still expensive as they require a special surface on which the image can be burnt. Over time, the price is likely to drop as we’ve seen with all other media.
Performance of the Lightscribe system on the GSA-H20L is reasonable. The rather simple pattern pictured above took almost eight minutes to complete. That’s many orders of magnitude slower than physically writing the data portion, which the drive handles with ease. There is a 2MB buffer to ensure the usual buffer-underrun protection. Obviously the image complexity will determine the length of time taken to complete. This is definitely a good alternative to manually labelling disks or having to print labels and sticking them on.
Overall, this drive is exceptional value for money. At a cost of under ZAR 400, the LG works as advertised and is able to read and write any potential disk you may want to throw at it. The package should contain a sample disk. Lightscribe is a useful feature, but the cost of coasters will have to drop and the actual lightscribing become faster. At least there’s no more excuse for scribbling illegible text onto a CD…
The inevitable will happen: Lightscribing will increase in speed, and colour support is probably on it way, too. That keeps us consumers and gadget purveyors doing what we need to do and do best: continue getting the next feature when available 
