Labelflash

In Labelflash, the standard recording head of an optical drive is repurposed to burn images onto a layer of dye made for this purpose on the top of proprietary Labelflash optical media. The dye is 0.6mm below the surface so as to protect it from the elements. The labeling process takes 7 minutes at the lowest resolution and a half hour at the highest. Labelflash is backwards compatible with Yamaha's earlier DiscT@2 technology—this allows Labelflash-compatible optical drives to engrave onto the data side of discs as well. According to Yamaha, a new iteration of Labelflash which supported four color printing was in the works—however, as Labelflash support was discontinued in 2017, this never came to fruition. == Reception ==

The technology is often compared with Hewlett-Packard's LightScribe, released one year earlier. After its release, Labelflash was not available in the United States until 2007, giving HP a three-year head start in the US market. Furthermore, worldwide, proprietary Labelflash optical media cost double that of comparable LightScribe media, Reviewers, such as Gordon Laing for Personal Computer World, also noted that when compared to LightScribe, Labelflash images looked more "unnatural" and less "vibrant". ==See also==