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Topic: Rental Blu-Ray disc quality
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 12-15-2009 07:29 PM
Hate to rain on any Blu-ray parade, but those types of discs absolutely can be scratched. I have come across rental discs that have been scratched or worse.
The term "scratch resistant" (used in certain BD marketing) does not mean "scratch proof." Blu-ray discs must be handled with care.
Additionally, Blu-ray discs don't like gunk such as fingerprint oil smeared on them. I've had a few rental BDs fail to load in my PS3 due to fingerprint smudges. After gently wiping the fingerprints off the disc with a soft cloth the BD loaded properly.
Overall, I've had pretty good luck with BD rentals. Tech enthusiasts, home theater fans, etc. are generally very good about handling optical discs properly. For the past 3 years BD has been a high end item with a limited audience, an audience of which arguably has more on the ball than the general public.
When DVD was still a high end item I also had generally good experiences with DVD rentals. But once the product went mainstream and "the great unwashed" began to indulge in DVD goodness the rate of rental disc abuse skyrocketed.
Once Blu-ray is a mainstream item we'll see lots of ways how those types of rental discs can be screwed up by piggy people with no manners and very little common sense. "Let the baby load the movie! It's no problem is he drools on the disc, chews on it or scrubs the floor with it. The video store has lots more copies!"
When that becomes the new normal, the pressure will be on to rent a copy of that new release on Blu-ray early Tuesday morning. That way you can get the first viewing before the pigs ruin the disc inside of a week's time.
This sounds like good marketing material for a movie downloads service. Except you're listening to crickets chirping while you wait for the download to finish loading.
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Michael Barry
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 584
From: Sydney, NSW, Australia
Registered: Nov 1999
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posted 12-16-2009 07:53 AM
My experience as a rental store person is that the scratch-resistant coating absolutely helps. The disc can still be rendered unplayable but it takes really serious abuse (compared to regular DVDs) for this to happen.
If there's a light scratch on a Blu Ray, then whatever caused it would probably have created a really deep scratch on a DVD by comparison.
Scratch-resistant coatings are standard on Blu Ray but I really wish they were standard on DVDs too. That would help me to do my job enormously!
At my store, we check our discs carefully when they're returned and clean off all fingerprints, food and other forms of grease (don't ask!) and set aside any discs that we suspect may not play for testing. Our test procedure involves playing the movie in a real DVD player from beginning to end in real time. If it locks up, we attach a note with the chapter/time that the problem occurred and the disc is then resurfaced with an Azuradisc 1600 machine. We then replay the previously unplayable section. If it works, the disc has passed and can be reshelved. If not, the disc is immediately binned and a new copy re-ordered. If the disc is out of print we obtain one second hand - from eBay if necessary.
This is a lengthy procedure, but it's worth it IMHO. As a result, our defect rate is virtually non-existent: it is exceedingly rare that a customer cannot play a disc due to surface imperfections.
The main reasons that unplayable discs come back to our store is incompatible firmware in the customer's machine, or simply a machine who's laser is on its way out. They will complain that they cannot load the disc at all, or that they cannot get past the main menu, or it locks up after chapter 3, or dies at the layer change. 99% of the time, we cannot reproduce the problem on the store's machine. We always offer them another copy but just as often, the same problems occur on another copy.
As far as scratch-resistant coatings go, there was a company that offered DVD distributors the option of hard-coating standard DVD discs. For a few years, many rental-specfic titles would ship with a hard-coating. One that comes to mind is 'Monster' (Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci). The hard coating was extremely successful: each of my copies has over 100 rents on them, yet they look like new. Not a single mark! Comparable titles from around the same era look much more worn and have even needed resurfacing to keep them going.
So the process absolutely works. The downside is that hard-coated titles (including Blu Ray) cannot be resurfaced at all. Once they are ruined, that's that. Having said that, I've never actually needed to repair one!
I've now got nearly 1200 Blu Ray discs and about 80 or so PS3 games, and I've only had to replace one disc. The customer responsible for that has been told to be more careful, and to his credit, he has been handling his discs perfectly ever since.
I fear that Bobby may be correct and that as Blu Ray gets more popular we will see more Blu Ray damage. I'll be doing my best to identify and warn folks who ruin my Blu Ray discs. If that customer cannot improve their ways, I would prefer to let that customer go than to make other customers suffer through defective discs.
Finally, the DVD plant that pressed 'Monster' here in Sydney - the only one - no longer offers the hard-coating service due to lack of demand. They stopped that service several months ago. I find this amazing, because here's a technology that actually works, and fixes one of the major problems for rental stores entirely. Apparently, the extra cost per DVD charged to the distributor was about $0.20. One distributor reasoned with me that hard coating doesn't increase their sales, only their costs. I reasoned with them that I would gladly pay an extra dollar per DVD for hard coating because it makes my life and the life of my customers easier. Clearly not all store owners see it this way.
What I find really amazing is there's a market for machines to fix discs, but that there's supposedly no market for a process to make discs that don't need repairing. I cannot get my head around that.
What all this boils down to finally, for me, is this: hard-coating or no, can't we simply learn, as a society, to handle discs by the edges? Because that would solve pretty much everything. Why is it that after decades or LP records and CDs do we still not quite understand to simply not touch the playing surface of a disc? Are we really that mentally challenged as a species? I notice that the majority of disc damage comes from the family section of the store. That means that children are given the discs to handle by their parents before they are capable of handling them correctly. Is this good parenting? I'm not a parent yet, but to me it's quite simple. If the child lacks the motor or comprehension skills to handle a disc without harming it, then the parent should be the one to handle it for them. Once the child is capable of understanding how to handle a disc, then it seems that the parent should instruct them on the correct handling of same. Am I missing something??
A long post, but I hope that helps!
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