Will Your Home Movie DVD Last a Hundred Years?

I was at Blockbuster the other day and stood in line behind a man buying Finding Nemo for his daughter. "That’s the third time I’m buying Nemo," he lamented, "The first two got too scratched to play properly.’ He’s lucky Blockbuster has unlimited supplies of Finding Nemo. What if it was a treasured family DVD that got scratched beyond repair?

If you are going to invest the time making home movies, don't burn them on just any DVD media. DVD prices have dropped so much the little extra you pay for extra protection is pennies.

What are you protecting against?

Protection against Scratches

Irregularities on a DVD's surface can interfere with the laser beam's path, preventing the laser beam from properly focusing on a disc's recording layer. DVD Repair kits work by micro-grinding the surface to smooth out the scratches.

Protection against Fingerprints

Fingerprints and other greasy contaminants cause smudges that stick to discs. This attracts dust and hard particles to the discs and cause more serious problems. That’s why everybody tells you not to touch the recording side with your bare fingers. Hold it by the edges. But you can tell from the miscroscopic picture that some DVDs are more resistant to smudges than others (the left side).

Protection against Dust

Conventional DVDs hold static charges that attract dusts and cause playback and recording errors. Discs with protection guard feature better anti-static, anti-dust properties, making the discs far less susceptible.

Verbatim has released DVD Rewriteable discs with VideoGard protection which makes it 40 times more resistant to scratches. It won’t protect the disc if you put a steel wool to it, but it will limit the damage of a disc that just falls onto the floor, enters the destructive hands of a younger family member, or wasn’t stored correctly.

A friend of mine put the disc through a non-scientific test against a Teon DVD Rewriteable disc that does not have VideoGard protection. He placed both disc onto a hard floor and swirled them around a few times. He repeated this 10 times, then dropped the two disc onto the floor repeatedly. After he had his fun, he flipped both disc over. Wow, I can honestly say that the Verbatim disc was not as scratched as the Teon disc. But will the disc still record? He placed it into his DVD recorder and recorded Spiderman 2. The disc recorded the movie and then played it flawlessly. However, the other disc was not even recognized by the DVD Recorder.

DVDs used to cost $2 a piece. Prices have really dropped. Right now, as I write this post, Amazon has a sale on these special Verbatim DVDs.
10pk VideoGard Protected DVDs for about $8 You can get either the DVD-R or DVD+R version.

Delkin Archival Gold DVDs with Scratch Armor are even tougher. They claim that the Scratch Armor's protective layer, combined with the non-corroding effects of gold make their DVDs outlast their competitors by decades. They call their DVD the 100-Year Disc.