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Will LightScribe Printing Work for You?
As editor of EventDV magazine, I spend a great deal of my time absorbed in the day-to-day machinations of the wedding and event videography markets, and have met and otherwise interacted with several hundred videographers over the last four years, and followed forum discussions involving hundreds of other videographers I've never communicated with directly. In all that time, I've met only one videographer, Kenneth Stillman of Kenneth Stillman Videography, who delivers his product on LightScribe media. Stillman, who runs a volume-based business that serves more than 100 wedding clients per year in the Philadelphia dn southern New Jersey areas, swears by LightScribe technology, delivered DVDs to all of his 108 clients on LightScribe in 2008, and has even gone to far as to contribute a testimonial to LightScribe.com. I exchanged emails with Stillman last December when I was testing Aleratec's new DVD/CD RoboRacer LS Duplex, which is to my knowledge the first LightScribe-based automated duplication system (unless Aleratec's single-drive RoboRacer system preceded it to market). I had great success with the RoboRacer LS Duplex, duplicating and printing upwards of 350 CDs and DVDs during the course of testing. I found the RoboRacer as reliable as any automated publishing system I've ever used. I completed my first two 100-disc runs with nary a coaster in the bunch, and the printing, while not exactly eye-popping, was absolutely consistent. Nearly all of the printing I did with the RoboRacer was text-based. My first attempt to print a photograph came out OK, and my wife liked it better than I did, which says more in LightScribe's favor, aesthetically, than if it had been the other way around. But the contrast was low and it didn't look to me like something I'd want to deliver to a client. Subsequent photo-printing attempts didn't come out any better, which is why I contacted Stillman, with two main questions for him: Did he use LightScribe for any photo-type printing tasks, and how did it play with his clients. "The key to making a good LightScribe disc," he told me, "is to find an image with high contrast. Faces should be well lit. Then in Photoshop I make it a B/W and boost the white and mids while crushing the blacks. The less grayscale in the image, the better it will appear." I found a higher-contrast photo, tried Stillman's method, and my results were much improved. As for client response to the LightScribe-printed discs, he told me that when he was first transitioning from inkjet to LightScribe, he would show prospective clients both options, and "it was about 85% who really liked the LightScribe." With aesthetic issues out of the way, the one incontrovertible advantage of LightScribe is consumables cost. I checked with Full Compass, our local pro A/V supplier here in the Madison area, and found (to my surprise) that a 100-disc spindle of LightScribe DVD media actually costs 36 cents per disc, 10 cents per disc less than Taiyo Yuden white inkjet hub-printable. But even if you find a better deal on the TY and even out the media cost, the best news about LightScribe is that it doesn't operate on the old Gillette "give away the razor, make your money on the blades" business model that the inkjet printing industry has copied, with a full set of print cartidges usually exceeding the cost of the printer itself. This issue is a little murkier on the volume disc publishing side than with the Epson Stylus R200 and its single-disc ilk; with automated systems, you're really paying for the robotics rather than the printer when you first purchase the unit. But volume printing is where the consumables issue with inkjet printing is really writ large, and that's the main reason I was so interested in checking out the RoboRacer LS Duplex. The 350 discs I printed during testing would have certainly put me in arrears for at least one if not two rounds of cartridge replacements with an inkjet-based system. Granted, there's really no replacement for the glorious full-color photographic prints you get from a Primera Bravo system if that's what your market demands, but if it's not, you can save a great deal of cost and waste by going with a LightScribe solution like the RoboRacer. My other primary objection to LightScribe printing in the past has been the time it takes. Thankfully, nearly all of us are well past the days when disc burning or printing is a debilitating foreground task for our PCs or Macs, but if you need to get a disc out the door, 10-14 minutes is a long time to wait for text to print. The first few jobs I put through the RoboRacer involved only a few lines of text in a custom arrangement on the disc, and all of these took around 12 minutes per disc to print. I find this less intrusive with an automated print job than if I'm doing one-offs, since I can put the RoboRacer to work, walk away, and let it run all night if necessary. That said, it was a relief to discover that if I stuck with the default curved text configuration, I could cut down print time to a much more manageable 3-4 minutes and still get a decent text-only look. How the RoboRacer Works
The Aleratec RoboRacer design is nothing short of ingenious, and it's quick and easy to set up, which is a good thing, since the documentation is spartan and often comes up well short of explaining key tasks. To set it up, you simply install the four clear plastic disc guide rods in the feeder tray at the top, and you're ready to load up to 100 LightScribe discs in the system. Then you attach one or two disc output bins (basically, cake box tops)--one if you're doing burn or print only, two if you're planning to do both. The RoboRacer connects to your PC via USB 2.0, and should register as two Aleratec DVDRW drives. You'll also need to install two pieces of software: the RoboRacer LS Duplex Utility, which automates the multidisc burning process, and Nero 7 Essentials, which you'll use to create and implement your surface print designs. In the Duplex software you have several choices: Burn from Disc Image, Copy Disc (both burn-only), LightScribe Labeling (print-only), Burn from Disc Image + LightScribe Labeling, and Copy Disc + LightScribe Labeling (both). To burn only or to burn and print, you place one disc, label side up, in the input bin on top, then pile on as many as you choose (the bin should hold 100 but Nero will only take jobs up to 99). To print only, you place your discs in label side down. In either case, the top drive will take care of the job you send and drop the discs in the top output bin. But burning and printing is where it gets cool: The discs drop into the burn drive tray, burn, pop out, get flipped by the small flipping arm, and drop into the print drive tray, ready to print, the discs print ... waiting ... waiting ..., then pop out of the print drive tray and, using the bottom robotic arm, are lowered into the bottom output tray. The transitions are a little noisy, but except for a couple of quickly corrected issues I experienced with the top burn-drive-to-print-drive flipper, they happen very predictably and reliably. The only other thing that detracts from the smoothness of the system is the lag times you'll experience in some jobs between burn and print. With most print jobs taking significantly longer than burn jobs (so, say, burn #26 will get done a few minutes before print #25), the burned discs end up waiting in the open tray for several minutes before getting flipped and into the print tray. But if you stick with the text template and get your print jobs down to 3-4 minutes, you can eliminate the lag time, especially when you're burning DVDs. All in All
All in all, it's a very smooth, reliable, efficient, hands-off process; just be prepared to wait about 29 hours for a 50-disc burn/print job. Also, due to the limits of the documentation and some quirks in the software, the burn-to-print progression can be a little off-putting at first. First of all, it's not apparent that you need to launch Nero to get the print end of a burn-and-print job going (all you get is a "waiting on Nero" message from the Duplex utility). Further confusing matters is that you get the same screen when Nero is running but the print drive is not yet ready for another disc. Aleratec tech support was very prompt, helpful, and thorough in clarifying this process and getting me up and running, but it would be nice to see it explained in the all-too-brief "Quick Start Guide" that ships with the unit. The main issue is that Nero Cover Designer needs to be running, it needs to have the label you've designed open, and then you need to have clicked Print LightScribe label and then Print. And if there's any lag time between the beginning of the first burn and the beginning of the first print in a multidisc job (as there always will be), you'll get a "No disc in drive" error message that you simply need to ignore until the problem rectifies itself (which it will). If you press OK (which would seem to be the normal course of action), it will derail the whole process. Quirky start aside, once you get used to ignoring that message from Nero, it should be exceptionally smooth sailing through the rest of the process. (Note that none of these software issues impede the functionality of the RoboRacer as long as you know what to do, even though what you need to do is a bit counter-intuitive.) Just walk away and let it run, and if you can get past your "full-bleed photo" expectations and be happy with 50 or 100 cleanly printed discs that will come out exactly the same every time an not cost you a penny's worth of ink--and produced by a system that you bought for a more-than-competitive $1,049--you and the RoboRacer will get along just fine. Stephen Nathans-Kelly (stephen.nathans at infotoday.com) is editor-in-chief of EMedialive.
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