The exception ...

In my experience with CD players, it`s not the dust on the actual lens that is the major problem, but a coating of dust or film of some kind of tarnish on the angled mirrors beneath the lens. Not easy to get to in most cases.

IMO

Ron(UK)

It depends upon where you live. Here it's the other way around. Most of the DVD players I have seen with problems can be fixed by cleaning the lens. Of the rest, they can often be "fixed" by tweaking the drive power to the laser.

Of course fixed is a relative term, in a few weeks the ones that have been tweaked tend to stop working completely. I assume the laser has burnt out.

I decided to fix the problem with failing DVD players that lasted 3 or 4 months by getting a bigger hammer as it were. My kids tend to leave a disk playing and switch to regular TV, sometimes for days.

I replaced my player with a computer with an IR remote control and TV out.

I use cheap DVD burners in it. After about 6 months of heavy use they start to have problems playing disks, so I replace them and put them in a desktop computer. So far I'm on my fourth, while I would have been on my 8th or 9th cheap DVD player.

It also has the advantage that it will play just about any video file I can find, and will play them from a file server across my network.

Geoff.

That's true, Ron, but often the amount of dust within the laser is small compared to the amount on the outside of the lens, and a good external lens clean will restore the laser's RF out to almost normal, whereas there is hardly ever any external dust on DVD lasers due to the inherent 'dusting'effect of the high disc speed. The old JVC Optima 150S laser had enough clearance at the side of the lens assembly, if pushed carefully to one side, to allow a dry cotton bud (Q-Tip) to *just* squeeze down the side, allowing the critical-angle mirror to be 'brushed' clean, but that's the only laser I know where you could do this, apart from the '6S replacement for it ... ;~}

Arfa

Id venture to say that this is the cause of many more failures than given credit for. Especially when the unit is located in a less than perfect environment where air-born contaminates are great as in industrial or in homes with heavy smokers. Problem is it is non-repairable in most cases. I recently tore apart a failed drive from a stand alone DVD burner to scavenge the DVD diode. No way could you get to that CAM to clean it.

One other failure I've seen in game drives like the XBOX is that dust blown over and off the lens can actually land on the CAM. Instead of trying to overdrive the laser, one might first try to blow some air into the sled where those parts are and see if that does some good. I've done this to my son's XBOX where it originally failed I blew some air through the open tray and that fixed it for a month. After which the circuitry could no longer compensate for a dusty CAM. A shot of canned air onto the sled forced the dust out of the cavity where the CAM was located and restored the drive and it still works several months after.

That's interesting. Next time I'm ordering, I'll get a can of air duster, and give it a go on a few ...

Arfa