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So i would like to think that this will be an enlightening and interesting review of mine. Especially for anyone who has been considering getting a LightScribe DVD burner.

What is LightScribe?

LightScribe is a media labeling technology. And how it works is it melts one side of an optical media. Sound cool doesn’t it? And it is! I’m always surprised to hear that people buy those label printers… and better yet those CD stompers! A friend of mine ruined his drive because a label came off when spinning! In any case this, imho, is worlds better than any CD stomper. And unless your home is a CD print center… this is probably not a bad choice for making labeled optical media.

Samsung SH-S183L SATA?

Now, as it turns out from a conversation with my mate a few days ago, some people haven’t heard of SATA optical drives yet (I of course don’t mean the people that haven’t heard of SATA yet ). Why would you get a SATA drive? Because IDE is slowly going the way of the floppy and becoming a legacy port that is just on the mainboard. Why not buy a SATA drive? Windows recognized it as ATAPI. 0 problems with my BIOS detecting it either (albeit after a CMOS clear). Some of the biggest benefits to SATA are the cables. Both the power and data connector are much easier to connect. There are no pins to be bent. And the cables themselves are much lower profile, eg. you’ll get better ventilation.

Why 2 drives?!

Why not?! 48€! It really isn’t that much money considering these will be with me for a good while

Why the Samsung SH-S183L?

Simple, all manufacturers are generally the same these days with the exception of companies like Plextor… which cost 2 times as much. This drive doesn’t cost much (48€ OEM). And i got it K&M Elektronik in Berlin which means that if i did have problems that I could just run down there and return the drives. I really can’t tell you much about read/write speeds… because I never care! I can’t believe the forum discussions I see sometimes.

“Hey but drive A burns a DVD 25seconds faster than drive B!”

Use that time to make a sandwich, make a playlist or something else… As someone who owned a Mitsumi 2xCD-R/RW drive… I think that discussing burn times in +/- 25 seconds is ridiculous Not to mention the difference is usually even less than 25 seconds. By the way, 2x = 40mins of burning for an 80min CD That was back when most burning programs couldn’t burn mp3s!!! They couldn’t convert them on the fly fast enough. You had to make .wav’s first. Oh yeah, and napster was around

Now… the Samsung SH-S183L

The Samsung drive has the following features

In any case it has everything I wanted (and could ask for). Its 18x, +/- R/RW and Ram. And also does Double Layer . Oh yeah, and it has LightScribe
So, as i said, the drives DID install fine. I had no unexpected problems. In fact, it even boots from CDs fine! Of course the windows installer will need your SATA drivers to correctly continue the installation, but thats what nLite is there for All in all these drives met my expectations. They are quick (18x) and i had no problems burning a verbatim 16x LightScribe DVD at 18x. No problems with reading or burning CDs either

A very missed feature (Nooooo!) from the drives that I’m upgrading from (Lite-On) is that you could just nudge the Trays and they’d immediately go in.

What about LightScribe?

What about it? It does what it says… but unfortunately, and I didn’t know this before buying these drives, is that LightScribe takes 15 mins to make a label on media v1.2 (this is a CD media standard from LightScribe) and 35 mins or more on older media! However this is by the looks of it something that is dependent on the CDs and not on the drives. Which is of course another plus for this drive and kudos to LightScribe for thinking that bit through and not forcing constant drive upgrades (I hope)

So how does it look?

WARNING: DON’T EXPECT A PHOTO TO COME OUT!!! I expected a bit more out of LightScribe which was probably just me being naive. I ordered some more DVDs and I’ll give you all more examples later on. But at the moment i just have this label (thrown together in 3 seconds thanks to google and a keyboard) and this label was made with normal quality. “Best” is said to be look better obviously and when i get more discs I’ll make an article about that too. Anyway, here it is:

I ordered green discs… because if I’m making labels i don’t want a cream colored CD… thats just not cool That is another plus for LightScribe, by the way. There are a lot of colors you can choose from. LightScribe also has some cool free designs on their website (buyer propaganda? ) that can quickly be downloaded and applied to whatever disc you are making.

And what software makes this?

Well the drivers and some background software comes from LightScribe’s download page (Windows, Mac and Linux!). The software integrates with CD certain labeling software. All in all I’m pretty happy although I really don’t like the beige colored labels. And thus, we’ll just have to see how it all looks when i get my green media

Pros

• Quick Drives (18x!)
• Burns all types of media
• Good price
• SATA, SATA, SATA!
• LightScribe
• Available in black (look how many drives aren’t you’ll be surprised)

Cons

• LightScribe != LightningFast (bit slow)
• Not the best looking bezel (Samsungs in general)
• Activity LED looks like the emergency eject hole
• Can’t just push the tray in

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