sldvd

I got a DVD today and was looking at the reflective side under a bright light to check for scratches. I ended up seeing some small circular deformities in the aluminum layer. They look kinda like craters that you would see on the Moon. One of them is maybe 1.5mm wide, and the others are smaller. I saw a few overlapping each other - they almost looked like the Olympic rings.

I tried to take a photo of one of these craters: http://imageshack.com/a/img208/1193/f1y9.jpg

So my question is this - if you saw these on one of your DVDs, would you be concerned at all about them possibly shortening the DVD's lifespan or anything?

milo bloom

Does it look like an actual physical deformity or just something in the chemical layer? If it looks physical, I'd try to exchange if it was new.

E_v_i_l

Is that an actual hole? Doesn't look like anything I've seen before.

sldvd

They're not holes, they look like tiny perfectly circular dents in the aluminum layer. I'm not sure what chemical layer you're referring to, since I believe DVDs are just 2 layers of plastic plus the aluminum layer.

TomOpus

I would put the disc through it's paces to see if playback is affected. I've never seen those either but I don't check every disc for scratches under a bright light. I only look if the disc plays funky.

If you exchange it, and it's an issue with the batch, you might get another disc with the same problem.

thetao

Sorry, I've never seen anything like that either. But if you want to put a finer point on it, assuming you don't already have a CD/DVD/BR burning suite, download a program that can scan the DVD for errors. Nero DiskSpeed 11 and QPXTool are both free, OptiDriveControl has a 30-day trial, and I'm sure there are others. I don't burn very often, so never put much emphasis on this, but after getting a few bad disks during Black Friday sales, have started checking swaths of my collection. If you need tips on using the software, you may want to re-post in the Tech Talk forum.

Josh-da-man

I've seen a few with similar issues.

They look like a flaw in the polycarbonate (the actual plastic that the discs are made of, not the data layer). If they're small, it shouldn't affect playback, but larger ones might cause skips and freezes.

If it is in contact with the data layer, there's a possibility that it could cause the aluminum data layer to oxidize, but I haven't had any discs with these flaws fail on me. If they skip, they've skipped when they're new.

gerrytwo

In all likelihood, that is a pressing error. The only errors I have seen on pressed DVDs I bought are hairline cracks which make the disc unplayable. And that happened twice that I recall and could have been from damage during shipping. As to disc longevity, any bubble or unevenness between the substrate and the polycarbonate surface shouldn't be there. I would have thought that even a small anomaly like the one in your picture would cause a freeze-up at the circular imperfection if the imperfection was inside the recorded part of the DVD. Unless this posting is not totally kosher.

triste realtà

I have only one dvd that has that near the edge: Blue Underground's Ghost Galleon aka Blind Dead 3 and there is no skipping. Something like this will make it skip/pixellate if it blurs the laser. It was in the plastic, not the reflective layer on top which is what this looks like. It must be rare cause like I said I have only seen it once, even with all CDs, CDRs and DVDRs.

I have some CDRs that have chips in the reflective top layer and they don't skip along with a couple pressed CDs that have pinholes. I am wondering how to fix this. I am thinking chrome paint or silver metallic sharpie.