CD-R 80 Min 25Pk 5 Colour Lightscribe 52x V1.2 product reviews

Once upon a time, before Noah had to order 2500 pairs of water wings, CD's were ugly things with wierd coatings and the only way to tell what was on them was to either slap a couple of self-adhesive labels on them with some info scrawled on them in pen, or to write directly on the disc with laundry markers, and thus risk damaging the disc's datalayer if you pick the wrong pen and use a solvent-based ink.

Then, in true Darwinian style, a generation of discs evolved that were not ugly, and had white or silver surfaces that could accept ink from printers... and then something new evolved... LightScribe... a system that lets you etch a label directly into the surface of the disc, using the laser in your disc burner! Now the first generation was pretty scary, with a colour somewhere between gold and the mud that spawns it... but it seems that Verbatim has indulged in a bit of R&D.

Out of the mysterious depths of their labs have crawled a new breed of LightScribe disc... one with colour... five colours in fact. OK, they still only accept one colour of image... shades-of-black... but if you are creative enough, a nice duotone image is possible with some crafty use of Photoshop and an up-to-date LightScribe Burning application, such as Nero.

Now, these here coloured discs are pretty nifty little devices indeed. Obviously, they can be used to colour-code data for easy sorting and recovery... red for confidential data, green for public domain, blue for images, that kind of thing... but another seriously nifty new twist is the speed at which you can imprint them. On average, our tests confirmed their claims... four times faster than your run-of-the-mill first-generation LightScribe discs... -sigh- They grow up so fast...

Overall, the biggest factor of these discs is certainly their coloured basecoats and LightScribe nature. When it comes to burning the data these discs are as common as all the other high-quality Verbatim discs, so hardly worth noting at all. If the durabilty and ease of LightScribe appeals to you, if you want to be assured the disc still has the data on it intact, and if you want something quite different and visible... then these are for you. Keep in mind, the ONLY colour you are going to have is that of the disc itself... LightScribe works like a fax, it's a kind of thermal printer after all.