I became interested in a machine which could get rid of medium/heavy scratches which I was unable to remove with various manual techniques. These had become a serious problem on playback with some of my cd and dvd players causing skips, clicks and hangups. I saw these machines first on e-bay and later on Amazon, with pretty good reviews there so I bought one.
I am perfectly happy with this - for about $140.00 you have a simple machine to fix discs which have gone bad. So far I have completely fixed about 15 bad discs and used the machine to fine polish many others. I also use it with dvd's and it's documentation claims it will work with game discs.
Basically it is a medium/high speed disc spinner with two polishing pads, which spin on the surface of the disc as the disc rotates. You stick on two pads, apply grit/cream and let the machine spin for period of 10 sec at a time. I didn't initially think this would be enough time, but this is a good enough length of time and the cd can get fairly warm even on one cycle. If discs are badly scratched you may run the machine through several 10-sec cycles.
The machine comes with three grades of polishing pads and three grades of grit/cream. With a badly scratched disc you might start with the roughest grade of polish and then go medium and then fine, changing the pads each time of course. There are also two grades of sandpaper mounted on a stiff foam backing for manual use with bad scratches. I found that after using this I had to do a lot of machine polishing to get the sandpaper scratches out.
The unit comes packed with a good number of pads and a reasonable quantity of grit/cream although I ended up needing more of the fine pads used just for polishing. I had been using Micro-smooth, a fine grade of disc polish, even on good discs for its sonic benefits, but I found that my manual polishing, even using the very good Auric polishing cloths, always left obvious scratches. Using the Zdag, I get a perfect looking finish.
As I looked further into these machines, I found that there were several other similar machines available at higher prices and aimed at the professional market. The current model is probably not as solid as the more expensive ones but still seems pretty well-made.
