RESTORE-A-DISC
Evaluating the Disc Doctors Electric Disc Repair System

Written by Mark Mills

Disk Doctor Product Page
Price: $79.95

Everyone knows that there are correct ways to handle DVD's and CD's. But in reality not everyone actually follows those guidelines. People mishandle discs, they leave them laying on their TV cabinets and even very occasionally use them as drink coasters. Due to this, nearly everyone will have a CD or DVD that is scratched in one way or another.

But before we start going on about this, how about we quickly go over how a CD and DVD are actually constructed (in a very simplistic way). I am sure that someone will correct me about this, but remember its very basic explanation by someone with a basic understanding!

Both CD's and DVD's are fairly similar in design, a layer of plastic with tiny pits or bumps (depending on which way you are looking at it) in a continuous spiral on the disc, from the inside out. This is then covered with a thin aluminium reflective coating. In the case of a duel layer DVD, there are two layers of plastic and pits/bumps, but the outer layer of the disc is covered with a semi-transparent, semi-reflective gold coating instead of the aluminium coating.

A CD / DVD reader then uses a laser to register the pits and bumps on the plastic, which is then converted into data. In the case of duel layer discs, the laser is able to focus so that it passes directly through the gold layer, thus being able to read both the gold and the aluminium layer. The laser reflects off the aluminium or gold layer and hits a sensor which detects the difference in the laser bouncing off the bumps/pits to where there are no bumps/pits which is in turn registered as data bits. This is then interpreted into data that your CD player, computer or DVD player can understand.

Now the problem that scratches cause with this is that it can no longer accurately reflect the laser through the plastic layers, causing data to be misread. This results in skipping, discs hanging, and generally bad things to occur.

So what exactly do you get for your money with this Restore-A-Disc kit? Included in the package is the disc repair unit, about the size of a 1990's CD walkman, 10ml of repair solution, 1oz of Optical Cleaner, a set of yellow cleaner wheels, a set of purple repair wheels, and a set of red/pink polishing wheels.

So how well does it all work? As a test, I played around with a few different types of discs, two Audio CD's and a couple DVD's.

First up is the Audio CD's, I had an old copy of Moby - Play, and Romeo and Juliet Soundtrack that were both pretty damaged. The Moby would still play but looked extremely scratched up. The Romeo and Juliet CD would play but skip and jump in various locations while listening in all CD players that I have.

The repairer unit has two different settings for cleaning, one for slightly scratched discs, and one for Deeper Scratched discs. The Moby disc was treated to the slightly scratched clean which takes roughly two minutes using the repairer discs in the unit. You place 3 drops of the repair solution onto one of the wheels, drop in the disc and press the REPAIR button. It's that simple. The disc came out looking 100% better and the small scratches and marks on the discs were gone. It almost looks brand new.

The Romeo and Juliet soundtrack was a different story. The standard repair process did not solve the problems, so onto the Deeper Scratched Disc repair function! To do this you use the polishing wheels, then the repair wheels. This is a slightly longer process, but it actually worked, the disc would now play without a single skip on any track.

Next up was a DVD that I damaged on purpose. Unfortunately this is where I discovered the limitation of the unit, plus my own stupidity in expecting that the unit could repair deep scratches inflicted on the disc by a house key. Unfortunately the unit could not resurrect the disc. Luckily I used a DVD that I did not care about too much! After this failed repair attempt, I moved onto the next DVD which was full of normal usage wear and tear type scratches, no large deep ones to be seen. This disc had lockup problems in my Sony DVP-725D DVD player before the repair process. Once again the standard repair process did not repair the discs to a viewable state, so I swapped over to the deeper scratch process. This leaves a swirl pattern on the disc, as you can see in the picture which apparently does not hurt playback. But being the type of person I am, I placed it in the standard repair setting again to remove these swirls as the instructions indicated, it does not remove them totally, but it does a good job. The larger of the visible scratches on the disc were still present, but the majority of the smaller ones had now disappeared. Playing the disc in my DVD player now worked perfectly.

(click image for larger version)

So overall this disc repairer works fairly well, able to successfully bring both an audio CD and a DVD back to life. Obviously there are some discs that are just beyond saving, such as the key scratched one that I tried. If you have discs with large amounts of small scratches, then this device should be able to solve playback problems. This really is the lazy-man's version of the Scratch Wizard manual polishing kit, so if you do not mind paying extra to save manual labour, then this is the thing for you. Be aware that you do need to replace the wheels periodically, the recommended intervals is after 20 cleans for the cleaning wheels, and after 5 repairs for the repair wheels.