Lightscribe – line printing & grayscale test
My previous article about Lightscribe has proved very popular, so here is an update with more information about the real practical use of Lightscribe labeling technology. In this test I’ve looked at the printing of fine detail (lines) at various angles (star shapes) and printed a grayscale test using swatches of gray from 10% to 100% in 10% increments. What more do you need? Let’s get a picture onto the stage and have a look at what results we have…
'Melody' branded gold Lightscribe disc
There you can see the result of the test. As it says, these are 96dpi images that should be on your screen at approximately life size for most people, except perhaps netbook users. If you are very interested in the quality and want a close up look of the print source file (300dpi TIF) and a scan of the disc done at 300dpi, then click the obvious links in this sentence!
What does it all mean? Looking at the picture above gives you a thousand words of meaning! But I must tell you how I created the source image and Lightscribed it so you know that it is a valid and useful test. I created the lines and shades test in Adobe Illustrator, obviously as vector/postscript data. The lines weights are measured in ‘points’ rather than something more commonplace like millimetres, just out of tradition, just as many programs use ‘points’ for type size nearly everyone is familiar with. The file set up as a 12cm square and I exported a greyscale TIF at 300dpi. This TIF was placed in the Lightscribe labelling program with no scaling/stretching applied, set to just crop off any bits that went over the edges. The disc image was burned using ‘Best’ mode.
The greyscale (or grayscale) test is very useful for getting images ready for print to Lightscribe. It maps the colours you see on screen, and would expect on paper if you printed to a decent postscript printer using the source greyscale or CMYK file in Illustrator, to what you get on the disc. I’d say the dynamic range from 0% to 100% in your graphics program is compressed to approximately 25% to 75%. The 0.5pt lines are printed very well but the 0.25pt lines show a bit of break up so I would use a minimum line width of 0.4pt on future Lightscribe disc projects. Also I’m quite pleased that although the tonal range is quite compressed the shades are quite distinct between every 10%, especially at the lighter end of the scale.
What do you think? Be my guest and post a comment.
Cheers, Mark
I’ve been searching for an article such as this! When I tried lightscribing simple text with a thin border – the text was very hard to read.
Thanks to this article, I now know what my lightscribe drive can do!
You’re welcome Jay. I used to work in a printers and part of the job was looking after the ‘rip’ so we would print out greyscale tests on film every week then feed them back through the machine to read them and it would calibrate and correct itself. With my regular paper printers I always have shade and gradient tests so I know what to expect from them. But of course I also follow pantone books for pro jobs.
Thanks for the first comment on Design Reviews, Happy Christmas!
What drive do you use?
I apologize if you have posted it elsewere.
Mark
For the tests on this page I used an HP drive built into the laptop I was using. I recently have got an LG drive which I was just going to test but it seems to be unrecognised as a Lightscribe device. I need to test it on another system before I decide to take it back as faulty. This is a shame as I like LG drives with all the features they have including DVD-RAM capabilities.