DVD Scratches

[dopp5]

I've seen several scratch removal tools advertised, etc. out in the world -- Does anyone out there have one that works really well and would recommend?

[sacajaweeda]

Somebody told me that turtle wax is good for scratched up CDs. I've never tried it because it sounded kinda nutty to me, but hey, for all I know it might work.

[redwudz]

A buddy brought me a rented DVD that would'nt work on his player. It looks like someone used one of those scratch removal tools to 'buff' it a little. Looked like frosted glass. I managed to scratch my WinXP disk ($$) and I used a CD polish along with a cleaner to painstakeingly clean up just that one scratch. Fortunately, I saved the disk. Bottom line: Do it by hand, just on the scratch. Some wax products may work by filling the scratch temporarily, but buffing it by hand (Very carefully) is usually the best way for permanent restoration. The small machine type buffers are going to grind the whole surface of the disk, and that is very risky. The surface coating is just a few mils thick, and easy to cut through. I tried wax on a deep scratch and no go. Maybe with a light scratch you would be OK. Backup as soon as you can.

[lgh529]

I have one and its about a 50% success rate. Actually, less than that for the standalone players. Usually if I have a problem, I'll try the tool and then backup the DVD to something else. Seems that my DVD-RW will sometimes read them OK when the standalone won't.

Overall, I'm not too impressed with mine.

[verchad]

I have had mixed success with a disc doctor type of cleaner. One disc was fine after using it. Another could only be read by my pc dvd-r/-rw drive after "cleaning/fixing". So I backed it up to another disc and trashed the original.

[dopp5]

That's exactly the information I was looking for. Thanks all!