SCRATCH WIZARD
Evaluating the Disc Doctors Manual Polishing System

Written by Al Day

Disk Doctor Product Page
Price: $19.95

Some of us are slightly over protective of our DVD's. You can pick us out, we're the ones with the elaborate character assessment questionnaire that you have to fill out before you can borrow anything from our library. Others, as anyone who makes use of video libraries knows, are less careful. If you have ever had a disc returned from a friend, or collected one from your local rental library to discover that it skips or freezes during play, then maybe some of the Disc Doctor's products are for you.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

DVD repair systems are usually optical polishing systems.

If you look closely at a DVD or a CD, it looks a bit like this:

If we get a scratch in the clear plastic layer (the “optical” side of the disc) then the laser can be deflected away from the etched aluminium layer (where the information is stored) causing the DVD player to freeze or skip:

Optical polishing systems work just like the cutting compound used to polish old faded paint on cars. They consist of an abrasive material (usually diamond or something very hard) is a very fine particulate form, suspended in a liquid. By rubbing the liquid into the clear plastic layer of the DVD, we are trying to polish out the scratch by wearing the plastic down below the level of the damage:

THE SCRATCH WIZARD CD/DVD RESTORATION KIT

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This kit consists of a bottle of repair solution, a double sided buffing pad and a soft polishing cloth that also doubles as a work surface:

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THE TEST DISC

I chose as my subject for this experiment, an unwatched (despite several attempts) of Bela Legosi's film WHITE ZOMBIE. This cinematic treat is available at most disreputable DVD retailers and in fact you will find they will often give you a couple of bucks if you'll take a copy away with you…

I first needed to create some damage to the disc, without actually rendering it completely unplayable. As an experiment, I placed the disc optical side down on the terracotta floor in my dining room, and then gently rotated the disc applying some light pressure.

This is what I got:

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This was all I needed to do to cause the disc to freeze solid at about 17 minutes into the movie. If I skipped past the frozen section, it froze again at 1:04:00, about three minutes from the end.

Since this was pretty representative of some of the damaged discs I had seen at local video libraries, I decided this was sufficient to be my test subject.

THE REPAIR PROCESS

Following the instructions on the back of the packaging, I laid the soft white cloth out on my work table and placed the disc, label side down, on it.

I then applied several drops of the repair solution on the disc:

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The buffing pad has two sides, a hard shiny one and a soft one. The hard side is used first, and the repair solution is buffed into the disc, working in small circles around the circumference. This is carried out until the solution begins to dry and harden.

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The disc is then polished with the white cloth until shiny:

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You end up with something that looks like this:

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The repair solution / buffing / polishing process is then repeated, but using the soft side of the buffing pad.

The final product looks like this:

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It's pretty hard to see, (it's even harder to photograph!), but all the fine scratches have to a large extent, gone. The larger scratches, probably caused by grit on the floor, are still there.

The whole process took about ten minutes.

DOES IT WORK?

I was disappointed when I look at the disc, I was worried that the scratches that I had created were too deep and were possibly unrepairable.

My fears were confirmed when I tried playing the disc and it still froze in the same places.

However, the instructions said to repeat the process until the disc worked, so I persevered.

I repeated the entire polishing process again. Nothing.

And again…still nothing.

And then, on the fourth polishing repeat, the disc magically stopped freezing at the seventeen minute mark. It wasn't a fluke, I played the whole chapter back and forth several times and it played perfectly each time. It did, however, still freeze at 1:04:00.

On repeating the polishing process a FIFTH time, the freeze at 1:04 was gone too. The disc played through until within 30 seconds of the end before the picture started pixellating, however I have little doubt that continued polishing would remedy this too. However, by this stage, my arm was getting tired….

CONCLUSION

The SCRATCH WIZARD is an effective tool for repairing light to medium damage to DVD's. A considerable amount of time and elbow grease is required to make the process effective and I imagine that the process would get quite tedious if one had a number of discs to repair, in that case I suspect one of the automatic machines would be infinitely preferable.

This would be a handy kit to have lying around for when an ebay purchase turns out to be not quite in the condition the seller described , or when a mail order purchase has shaken loose in it's case.