As mentioned, the GSA 2166D is a Super multi drive, supporting all the available formats and technologies, including Lightscribe, enabling the user to further customise the exterior of his burned CD media, replacing the old marker method with a more sophisticated picture "printed" on LS enabled media. Let us first take a quick glance at LS in general.

-What is LightScribe?

With a view to replacing the "old" fashioned CD markers, the LightScribe technology is an integrated system that with the combination of three key elements, manages to produce "precise" as it is said, CD and DVD labels. These three elements are the Lightscribe enabled drive, the specially dye coated discs, and the specific supported software. Note, that the use of specific coated media is required and cannot be done with any ordinary printable media.

-How it works?

In layman's terms, the LS enabled drive, uses a laser that emits light energy onto the thin dye coating of the disc (the label side of the media) chemically changing it so that visible points appear on the disc. As the disc spins inside the drive, the light beam marks even more points on the dye, following the pattern given to the drive's mechanism by the LS software mentioned previously. The result is a a precision image on the label side of the disc.

- LG 2166D LS feature

As we've already seen from the general specifications table at the beginning of this review, the LightScribe printing times mentioned, depend on the percentage of the surface of the media that we want to print on. These times are also listed below...

We managed to burn a full CD (LS enabled media is needed as described above, not just any media) and we then moved on to see how well the drive can print on the surface of the disc. The whole procedure took us around 30 mins to complete, which can be broken down into 4mins for the burn and 25-26mins to print. We used our default, custom made CDRinfo printing job for the LS media and the outcome is given below.

LightScribe feature is a definite plus for potential buyers who are fond of multi drives and the LS feature.