Have been having this 1GB Lexar Memory Stick for nearly 3 years now, and pretty much lived fine off it.  Decided to spoil myself and get a AU$86 Sandisk 8GB Memstick, so I now have to find stuff to fill it up with (guess I'll stock up on heaps of music for now) :P
Also, the new stick has that "Magic Gate: Supported" thing in the XMB, whereas my old Lexar stick had "Unknown" next to it (though it worked fine, and had "Magic Gate" on the physical card).

Also bought some Lightscribe DVDs to see how well LS works.  Kinda dodgey - you have to download and install the Lightscribe system software, then you can use something like Nero's CoverDesigner to burn a label.  I've always thought Lightscribe to be poo poo, but it turned out to be slightly better than I had expected - burning a full label took 16 minutes (had read that it usually took nearly 30 mins) and the quality is alright, however:

• Burnt image is too faint (hard to read some things) - have heard that it can be made darker by burning it multiple times, though I'm not sure whether you can just simply stick the DVD in and redo the label (might read up on that)
  
• The system software installs a service, which is set to start up Automatic (though I'll admit it doesn't take up that much resources; but I also dislike apps which don't give you a choice where to install them >_>)
  
• Since it's being burnt by your burner, you can only print onto the burnable area - many printable DVDs allow printing on some of the plastic part in the centre of the disc (thus LS has less area to burn on as opposed to printable DVDs)
  
• All LS DVDs seem to be an ugly gold-brownish colour
  
• LS DVDs cost about double that of regular printable DVDs
  
• Burn process isn't too fast (16 minutes on my burner)
  
• Only black and white (as opposed to printing), but shading appears to be reasonable
  
• Resolution isn't terribly great, but quite reasonable IMO
  

Overall, it should be fine for black and white images, as long as it's not too reliant on dark shades (or you burn the image multiple times).

Ive never used lightscribe, but long time ago I had a cd writer that would burn images into the unused portion of the data side of the disk.  It too was only greyscale shaded colors, it was extremely hard to see until you got it at the right angle, but then it was a wow because everything had a wierd holographic look and feel to it.  

All in all it was a very pointless feature because who burns a cd that isn't full?  Light scribe is a little more functional...but when i was burning alot of disks i used a casio thermal label printer that would use a print ribbon and print a 3"x2" sized area on the disk that worked real well and was cheap..but was only 1 color per ribbon and didnt shade very well, so it just made very nice looking titles and labels.

by the way...yay 8gb!!

Wow, never heard of burning images on the data side - sounds cool for a novelty feature lol.

Why not buy a 16gig,.!? i want a 16gig! got plenty of stuff to stuff it with! :)

lightscribe,.!? kinda useless feature to me,. i got a good marker,.. ;)

Don't have 16GB here.  And probably the price is through the roof - really don't need it (considering I'm fine with 1GB)...

Yeah, I got a pack of 30 LS DVDs for AU$24 - expensive-ish, but not too much.  Also got a pack of 25 DL DVD-Rs for $25 - also paid a premium on that, but not too bad (seems like prices of these things are coming down, though the price of Blu-ray discs have pretty much been on standstill for the last few months).

(This post was last modified: 14/11/2008 07:17 PM by Gadget.)

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:[list]

Burnt image is too faint (hard to read some things) - have heard that it can be made darker by burning it multiple times, though I'm not sure whether you can just simply stick the DVD in and redo the label (might read up on that)

I seriously doubt that would work.

You won't be able to align it perfectly. I mean the 2nd burning would not likely (read: extremely extremely unlikely) be exactly on top of the first. So most likely you will end up with another image on top of the first rotated some amount of degrees.

Heh, Necrobot going to come get me?