by Scott Garrigus

Compact Discs, CD-ROMs, and DVDs are all marvels of modern technology. We can now actually hold in our hands hours of audio & video, thousands of photographs, and volumes of information that could easily fill a room if produced in paper form. Made up of a thin metallic layer covered in plastic, compact discs store information via a series of grooves arranged in tracks that are burnt into the metal with a precision laser beam. The information can then be read by a compact disc player, which contains a lower power laser that is reflected off of the disc in different intensities depending on the grooves it encounters. In order to get a clear reading, however, the laser must first pass through the plastic coating of the disc. If the plastic gets damaged in any way, it can sometimes make the disc difficult to read or even totally unreadable.

Of course, compact discs are touted to be very tough and can stand quite a lot of abuse but (contrary to popular belief) they're not indestructible. Even small scratches in the surface can cause the laser to misread the data. This results in skipping on audio CDs and either garbled information or no information at all on CD-ROMs. Luckily, these scratches can be fixed, and the best product I've seen to date for this purpose is called Wipe Out! from Esprit Development.

Yes, there have been many other products claiming to cure compact disc damage but Wipe Out! is unique in that it isn't a wax or filler. Those types of products can cause damage to your CD player or CD-ROM drive by flaking off inside the drive chanism.
Wipe Out, on the other hand, is a polishing compound specifically designed to interact with the plastic coating of a compact disc. Instead of just filling the scratches, Wipe Out actually allows you to buff them out permanently. To work its magic, Wipe Out combines three active ingredients including... "a chemical which evaporates quickly and prepares the surface of the CD by "melting" a micro layer of the CD plastic coating, a micro abrasive compound which polishes the disc with your help, and a hard wax in liquid form which suspends all of the chemicals long enough to produce the desired results."

To repair a disc, you simply apply a small drop to the scratch on the disc and rub the compound with the included non-abrasive cloth until the scratch disappears. With really large or deep scratches you may have to apply Wipe Out! more than once. After the scratch is gone just clean the disc with water, dry it off, and your ready to rock and roll again.

The bottom line is that this product works and it works well. Wipe Out! can save you a lot of money by bringing new life to what you thought were dead audio CDs and CD-ROM applications.

Copyright 1998 Scott Garrigus