Sunday, November 28, 2004

Damaged discs in Greensboro

Patrick Eakes is a fellow blogger and Netflix subscriber who receives his discs from the same Greensboro, NC distribution center as I do, but he's having a big problem with damaged discs. This is what he says:

I have noticed that over the past three or four months, a large number of the DVDs I have received from Netflix are scratched and will not play properly. I would guess that about 1/3 of the discs have been damaged in this way.

Because of the recent problems, we clean every disc before playing. The problem discs we are receiving have visible scratches or gouges in the playing surface. Just to be sure, we even took the disc to my in-laws' player to confirm the problem, since it was unplayable past the 80-minute mark. The other player confirmed the defect.

In the case of Lost in Translation, I received the disc on the release date, so presumably I got a brand new disc. It had a gouge in the back so large that it looked like it had been struck with a screwdriver or similar object.

I always report the problems both at the web site and on the white sleeve. So far, Lost in Translation is the only disc that I have had them ship a replacement copy. We just lived with poor play performance or missing a few minutes of the other movies.


He has been very patient, I think. I think Netflix and the USPS should investigate. What are your comments on this issue?

2 comments:

  1. Over the course of a year, I've reported five discs that were damaged... two of them were minor skipping/freezing that I dealt with, three of them were unplayable (two because they were cracked) and I asked for replacements. Every time, the replacement was shipped the next business day and I received them in two. I have never received a damaged disc to replace a damaged disc (as one blogger claims continually happens to him).

    Nearly _every_ disc I receive has numerous small scratches over its entire surface and aside from those few, they've all played just fine, even though they look like someone lightly brushed them with 60-grit sandpaper. Of those that I had trouble with, two of them were childrens shows, which show greater than normal damage. (Too many parents letting toddlers handle the discs.)

    An unplayable disc is probably the most frustrating part of the Netflix customer experience. A certain amount of damage is unavoidable, but Netflix should be doing everything they reasonably can to avoid damage.

    I'm hoping the new scratch-resistant plastic layer developed by TDK makes it into the current DVD technology quickly, instead of holding out for the next generation.

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  2. I replaced my cheap Sony player with a nice Marantz progressive scan model. I now have very few problems with bad DVDs

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