Lightsribe technology was invented by HP and offers a cool way of adding professional looking images to your blank CD/DVD's, unlike a sticky label the technology literally burns the image - using a laser - onto the special service of the disc. So you need to buy compatible disc in order to use this, but these are in-expensive.

Back to the Freecom for a second, the external unit will appeal to Laptop users or those wishing to add a second DVD-Re-Writer to their PC but do not want the hassle of opening their case.

The black DVD drive is housed in a sleek silver case, finished off with the Freecom logo on the top, its build quality on the whole is pretty good and more important its weight is adequate enough for transporting and for taking the odd knock or two.

The drives mechanism was also sturdy and the tray moves in and out of the unit with a positive feel.

At the back of the external drive lies two Firewire ports, the mains plug-in socket with an on/off switch and one USB 2 port, which can also be used on USB 1.1 systems.

Freecom also supply you with one Firewire 400Mbps cable in the box and a smaller 6 pin Firewire connector cable for Laptops/MAC. Plus you get a USB 2 cable, a pack of five CD-R Lightsribe disks (it’s a pity you did not get any DVD disks) for trying the technology out and Roxio Easy Media Creator 7 Basic, Roxio Toast for Mac OS X machines and Sonic Cine player for watching DVD movies.

Installation as you would expect was fairly straight forward but we had problems at first getting the Lightscribe function to work, but this was actually not a Freecom problem at all. However as there was no answers to be found on the Freecom support site at the time we managed to solve the issue ourselves by downloading a Lightscribe diagnostic tool from the Lightscribe website which cured the problem instantly.

We told Freecom about the issue and thanks to Crowdedbrain they are now going to include this as a standard utility with future Lightscribe drives so we hope this saves you guys a bit of hassle.

The drive claims to be an 18x drive but as there are mainly 16x Discs available at the mo it will be a while before you can write at this speed. The supplied Roxio software could only detect the drive to run at 16x as well which means either a firmware or software update may be in order to run at the full speed - but this is just our theory.

The Roxio Easy Media Creator Basic software itself was pretty good, it allowed for copying or creating data/audio disks to both CD and DVD, label creation software, slide show utilities plus several others which are to long to list here.