Optical Disk: HP 740i DVD Recorder

Dec. 8, 2005

DVD recorder drives are at the top of the food chain until drives based on Blu-ray or HD-DVD start showing up. HP’s DVD 740i Writer drive supports double-layer media and LightScribe technology, putting it at the top of the heap for the current DVD technol

William G. Wong

The drive is available in internal (that we used) and external models. It supports all major formats including CD-R (40x), CD-RW (32x), DVD-R (16x), DVD-RW (8x), DVD-R DL (8x), DVD+R (16x), DVD+RW (6x), and DVD+R DL (4x).

The Lightscribe technology works with Lightscribe media (see the figure). The unadulterated media has a gold light sheen. Other colors will be available soon. Grayscale text and images can be drawn on this side of the media using the drive’s lasers. Just flip the disk over after digital data is written to print the images on the disk.

Lightscribe write time is based upon the complexity of the text and images. Plain black text is fastest and can take a few minutes. Complex, full disk images can take a good bit longer but the results are worth the wait. Incremental updates are possible. Just reserve an area for writing new text and images.

HP provides Lightscribe labling software and Nero DVD burning software with each drive. HP provided a collection of media, including double-layer DVDs. Lightscribe media costs a little more but the results are worth the price.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.