DVD Disk with water mark

[grey_moon]

I just brought the full Diebuster Set *cheer*

Unfortunately the disks are noisy as anything when playing back as they need to spin at full speed and that is on 4 different DVD drives. The thing that worries me is that disk 2 has a discolouring on the data clear side of it that looks like a watermark. It covers about 3/4 of the disk. It does play back, but is the disk damaged? Should I return it and try to get a replacement?

[Potatochobit]

I dont have diebuster, but its rare to have watermarks on the bottom. can you post a pic?

if you live in NA, sure, go ahead and bring it back to the store and exchange it. not sure about EU return policies.

If the first disc looks normal, but the second doesnt, thats a bad sign.

[grey_moon]

Originally Posted by Potatochobit

I dont have diebuster, but its rare to have watermarks on the bottom. can you post a pic?

if you live in NA, sure, go ahead and bring it back to the store and exchange it. not sure about EU return policies.

If the first disc looks normal, but the second doesnt, thats a bad sign.

There are only marks on the first 3 disks.

It seems that disk 1 to 3 are broken , 1 and 2 makes my drives spin at speeds approaching warp factor 9 and disk 3 starts hopping around randomly. All 3 disks can make my older drives stick. Looks like I'm wasting a few hours tomorrow to travel over to return them (I hope they have them in stock as it miles away)

[NightWish]

DVDs often have variations in the plastic that manifest as one or more irregular shapes visible under or in the surface of the plastic. Hard to describe, but an unintentional watermark sounds like a good description. I have a number of disks like this and they work perfectly fine. Discolouration like that shouldn't really have any effect on the quality of the information read from the disk, provided the information layer is intact and the laser can penetrate the surface to read from it.

The speed the disk spins shouldn't be an issue either, unless your drive is broken or the disk is very unbalanced in some way (so it wobbles in the caddy, which could be due to a manufacturing defect in the disk). However, you do want to look out for lots of frequent seeking or the drive spinning up and spinning down again in quick succession. That might be what you mean by the hopping around randomly. Such activity could indicate the disk has parts the drive is struggling to read and so you want to replace disk.

If you're in any doubt or can't get it to work, don't worry too much about why just get them to replace it. Normally a lot less hassle in the long run

[grey_moon]

I took your advice and returned them. I had to do it 3 times before I finally got a set that was complete. 2 of the disks have watermarks but don't stick.

Just as a side note I'm really glad I did return them as I have been auditing all my anime collection and my originals of The Cat Returns, Tenchi Universe, Majo King Granzoru, some of my Ranma, some of my City Hunter all which also had a watermark no longer work. I haven't checked my whole collection, but I'm dreading it. Funny thing is with The Cat Returns I was playing around with DVD Shrink and happen to take a back up of it on a really cheap nasty DVD-R and that still works!