OT: Do DVD burnersreaders age

Laser's do lose their emission & when that happens anything can happen.... normally with home commercial DVD's....

those things you shuff under the telly I mean, when laser's loose their emission or microscopic dust get's on to the inside on the actual laser, no, no I don't mean the actual focusing lens, I mean the lens on the laser diode, you'll get a drop in emission and don't forget the beam has to be reflected back onto a sensor, you are gonna get some return loss.

Down at the bottom under the proverbial lens theres a prism, you only need this to become.... should we say dusty.. the constant light going to the disc from the laser has to be seperated from the reflected light which is varying... thats the job of the prism.

I find many time's a DVD will not play and yet a audio CD will, a new optical block resolves this problem, since you can not strip these things down there's not much you can do only change the optical block as they are referred to.

.... and if that happens when you write, you are writing with a reduced beam and when you come to play back under certain conditions the loss has at least doubled if affected by dust... since the beam has to travel from the diode through the lens to the CD and back through the lens and any gubbins after the lens onto a sensor.

Nothing yet again has been said for the sled motor, the thing that drives the laser block across the face of the disc, more so I've changed a fair number of spindle motors that spins the disc, these things starts to scan at the inner of the disc towards the outer, the spindle speed is not constant like a record and has to be controlled from the data from the disc.

These days it's a throw away society, if it's broke buy a new one, and would imagine it's the same in computers CD-DVD drive's.

Davy