dbminter Posted January 21, 2014 Posted January 21, 2014 I have to wonder if Lightscribe is being phased out. NewEgg no longer offers internal Lightscribe enabled DVD burners. Only USB ones, and even at that, only a handful at inflated prices. Well, there is one older drive from a reseller, but that, too, is being offered at too high of an inflated price. $99! What really makes me wonder if Lightscribe is on its way out is lightscribe.com. I went by the main site and it's no longer active. It's dead. Why would they kill off the main site if the technology is still viable?
dbminter Posted January 21, 2014 Author Posted January 21, 2014 Looks like Lightscribe was already phased out! From HP's official site, they started phasing out Lightscribe drives in HP computers in 2011, due to "industry conditions beyond our control." Which probably translates into "low sales."
ianymaty Posted January 22, 2014 Posted January 22, 2014 Yeah. Lightscribe more and more hard to reach. I used to use lightscribe but since the discs are hard to find I moved on and bought a Canon Pixma iP7250 that print on discs. Now the discs have more colour and professional look. The lightscribe has its own feel in the way that it looks and the black and white shades looks great but it takes so long to print one disc in the drive, almost 30 min at full contrast. I think that was the problem of not being so popular and its time to move on. R.I.P. Lightscribe.
dbminter Posted January 22, 2014 Author Posted January 22, 2014 Plus, I read Windows 8 might have been the killer. Supposedly, Lightscribe drivers don't work in Windows 8 because they were never updated to work with them. I still Windows 7 so I can't say. I have no problem finding them as Amazon.com always has the Verbatim DVD-R's in stock I look for. It's the drives that are hard to find. The drawback to printed labels on discs is that over time they separate from the disc. The drawback to Lightscribe is the labels fade awfully easily. I've got some that only like 2 years old and they're already very faint. Still, I like to use them as a somewhat convenient way to label a disc's contents.
cornholio7 Posted January 22, 2014 Posted January 22, 2014 you print on the disc itself, not on a label, so it won't peel off
dbminter Posted January 22, 2014 Author Posted January 22, 2014 Odd, I thought I had just read that inkjet printable disc label surfaces were just stuck on there like those labels you apply with those large, circular button type things.
dbminter Posted January 22, 2014 Author Posted January 22, 2014 You know the funny thing? I use inkjet printable surface discs for my DVD+R DL's even though I don't have a printer that will write to them. I use them so I can write on them with CD/DVD safe markers. I don't know if Sharpee ink would bleed through, so I don't use those. And, the funnier thing is I've never actually written to their surfaces with markers! I don't even know if this idea works! It's something I just plan to do one day.
dbminter Posted January 22, 2014 Author Posted January 22, 2014 Well, I took the plunge. I just burned a BD-R with an inkjet printable surface on it. I wrote to it with a Sharpee CD/DVD safe marker. Well, they call it a CD/DVD marker. Not necessarily safe. Anyway, it wrote to the surface just fine.
dbminter Posted March 14, 2014 Author Posted March 14, 2014 Verbatim has discontinued manufacture of its Lightscribe DVD-R's according to Amazon.com. They've sold out of their stock; I got the last 50 stack it seems. Only resellers have it listed now. At least the prices aren't outrageous... yet!
dbminter Posted April 28, 2014 Author Posted April 28, 2014 TDK LightScribe CD-R's have also been discontinued by the manufacturer. So, yeah, I'd think it's safe to say that LightScribe is dead.
dbminter Posted September 12, 2014 Author Posted September 12, 2014 Don't know where I read that Windows 8 didn't support Lightscribe. Just burned one on my new Dell running Windows 8.1. It's just that they don't update the driver anymore. It works under Windows 8. Not so sure about "Windows 9."
ianymaty Posted September 13, 2014 Posted September 13, 2014 As you found out the Litescribe is dead. The proof is here. http://www.lightscribe.com/ It has support for Windows 8 as it was listed on the site. This is from the web archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20131023090942/http://www.lightscribe.com/downloadsection/Windows/index.aspx?id=810 If the 9 will work with drivers from 8 like 7 worked with drives from Vista, it may work but where you would get the media as I don't know if there is a manufacturer that still produce them?
dbminter Posted September 13, 2014 Author Posted September 13, 2014 Apparently, Verbatim still produces 10 packs of them. I can still find them on Amazon.com from Amazon itself. How long that lasts or if it's just remaining stock of 10 packs that hadn't sold yet I couldn't say.
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