LightScribe DVD drives have been available for quite a while, or at least they have if you own a desktop PC. Laptop users have had to wait a little longer for this interesting feature, but manufacturers are now shipping some of their latest notebooks with LightScribe drives.

If you're not already aware of the lingo, LightScribe means pretty much what you might imagine from the name; it's a way of writing labels on DVD discs using nothing but the drive's laser. No need to mess around with label-printing; simply burn the DVD as normal, flip it over in the drive and use the supplied software to create the label using the etching effect of the drive's laser.

Or, to quote from the marketing blurb, "The LightScribe technology uses the optical drive's existing laser to deliver precisely controlled light energy to the disc through an innovative circular writing system. Where the energy focuses on the disc, a visible chemical change occurs in the dye coating. The result is a high-resolution reproduction of artwork, text or photos."

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And it seems to work, although for obvious reasons your labels will generally be monochromatic, with colour depending on the type of dye used.

Toshiba's LightScribe drive is not an end-user product, so unfortunately you won't be able to slot it into an older laptop as an upgrade. It is only sold in new laptops; for example, a lot of the HP Pavilion range of notebooks include the LightScribe drive.

The SD-R6572M supports the following write speeds: 8x DVD+/-R, 4x DVD+/-RW, 2.4x Dual Layer DVD+R, 24x CD-R, 10x CD-RW. It reads at 8x for DVD and 24x for CD.

For people who burn many DVDs and don't want the hassle of creating stick-on labels or running the discs through a suitable printer, this is a good solution. Other people may not be too interested, but regardless of that it seems likely that LightScribe will become a standard feature of many laptops in the not too distant future.