Aleratec DVD/CD Disc Repair Plus
The Aleratec DVD/CD Disc Repair Plus cleans and repairs discs with light to medium scratches but may not repair heavier damage on your DVD’s CD’s and other discs.
Ease of Use, Performance: 15/25, Look & Feel: 10/25,
Features 10/25, How much I enjoy 10/25
Total: 45/100
I know Aleratec is not going to like this review but I am going to be honest, The Aleratec Disc Repair Plus does not work very well to remove scratches or heavy damage. The Aleratec DVD/CD Disc Repair Plus does a good job of cleaning a disc and can get rid of some light damage to your DVD’s and CD’s.
It may also polish the surface and smooth out some of the layer of plastic to make your disc playable but it will not work for any moderate to heavy damage on your DVD, CD or gaming disc. I have tried this out with about fifteen discs and came to the same conclusion that it works fine as a cleaner and for light repairs.
In order to understand something about DVD’s, CD’s and repairing them you have to know how they are made and how they work, so here goes. A CD or DVD, console game discs and Blu-Ray as well, work with a laser shining into the disc to read or write information off of a layer of material inside the disc.
There is a layer of plastic all over the disc on top and bottom of this internal layer so the information is not usually getting hurt by a scratch. What happens is the optical laser cannot shine directly to the layer that has the information on it and therefore skips. This skipping is due to the light not shining straight through and bouncing back but bouncing at an odd angle and getting lost.
When you have a scratch or scuff, or even dirt, the laser light will not pass through the clear plastic layer that you see on the disc and bounce back to the optical eye that sees and reads the laser. There is a layer of clear plastic that is getting scratched so scratches are not just a three category amount of damage but an infinite variety and difference.
Usually you have damage that is superficial or does not affect the playing of a disc, I have plenty of these but they are no big deal, they only look bad. Then you have scratches that are damaging the laser path and making your disc skip but it is only in the layer of plastic and sometimes can be buffed or polished out.
The third is actual damage so deep that it is into or close to the material that is used to store information on, cracks and dents are in this category for my examples. If you have a scratch or anything else like dents or cracks that actually damage the layer of the disc that information is stored on polishing the plastic will not fix anything.
I have a basic understanding of some metallurgy and quality control practices with a few years as a quality inspector at a manufacturing and assembly factory where I worked with polishing. I understand how to polish samples for inspection under a microscope and know a fair amount of using a wet sander polisher machine to take a rough sample and turn it into a mirror finish so it looks nice and smooth under a microscope.
Polishing an object means you have to start with a rough sanding surface and work your way toward a really smooth one to get the part smooth. With a disc you already have smooth; you just need to get things even smoother so you have to use some kind of polishing compound that will take some of the surface off the disc but not too much.
A disc polisher that uses a small amount of a polish compound may not to be able to take off enough of the plastic layer of the disc to make much of a difference unless you repeat the process a lot. I tried repairing a disc by buffing it which gave me small circular scratches on the surface of the disc which shows it is removing some of the disc surface.
Once you have done this coarse sanding to remove an even layer of the disc you need to remove more using a polishing compound and smoother polishing pads. This worked to get rid of most of the circular scratches but only after more than a dozen applications of polishing compound and runs through the repair process.
I am not sure many people are going to want to run through this process this much to get a disc repaired when taking into consideration the cost of the machine, cost of replacement repair pads and fluid. The machine costs about $45 and a refill kit with all the supplies costs $35 but you can get a refill kit just for the repair process for about $10.