The latest DVD writer from HP, model dvd640i, is a naughty little minx. It teases us with its specification, which has the key headline figure of DVD+R 16x. Naturally it supports both plus and minus formats, as well as dual layer, and there's no escaping the fact that the HP brand is a good name to have on your hardware.

So far so good, but then you look a little more closely and you see that the rest of the specification is a bit dubious. The DVD+RW speed is 4x when many new drives support 8x writing, the DVD-R figure of 8x looks a bit limp compared to the 16x that most competing drives can muster, and the 2.4x dual layer figure doesn't look good when so many drives run at 4x.

The specification isn't the be all and end all of a DVD writer, and many models will work above and beyond the nominal speed of the media, but here too the HP drive lets the side down. It takes nearly nine minutes to burn a full DVD using DVD+R media, compared to six minutes for the competition, while DVD-R is only slightly slower despite its nominal 8x rating. In fact the DVD-R feature works far better in practice than it does on paper, however you are likely to find that the HP won't work with 16x DVD-R media at all, so make sure you have the correct 8x DVD-R media to hand.

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The price of the HP also looks a little steep at £60. This is far cheaper than we were paying for multi-format DVD writers only a few months ago but the trend is down, down, down, and the going rate for competing brands is more like £40, which is an incredible bargain. While we're heaping opprobrium on the dvd640i we might as well say that we're not too keen on the Sonic RecordNow 7 software, and would far rather have Nero 6, although the ArcSoft ShowBizDVD 2 and Cyberlink PowerDVD parts of the package are welcome.

On the plus side, the installation software carried out an on-line check on the firmware. It found that an update was available and presented us with a single-click option to update the software which we gratefully accepted.

So what, you may be wondering, was HP playing at when it specified the dvd640i? Well it has a new feature up its sleeve which pulls the rug from under its competitors' feet and thus saves the day. We're talking about LightScribe, which is a cunning new disc-labelling technology which uses the writing laser to first write the disc, then you flip the disc over so it is upside down and the laser writes on the label side of the disc. HP has a slogan - 'Burn, flip, burn' - which it quotes like a mantra, but it sums the process up very neatly.

The process is just like any label writing system, except that you don't print on the disc with your printer, and neither do you print a label and stick it on the disc. The result is that the special LightScribe disc looks like it has been screen-printed in a bronze colour. It works very well indeed but if you get carried away and print, say, the album artwork for an audio CD, rather than a simple track listing, then you can expect the process to take half an hour.

HP developed the LightScribe technology, which it has licensed out to other manufacturers, so the dvd640i is actually made by LiteOn. LightScribe transforms an otherwise mundane and expensive DVD writer into an exciting new product that is right at the cutting edge. You can expect to see LightScribe popping up in many more DVD writers in coming months.