"Arny Krueger" wrote in message ...

I haven't noticed that DVDs are appreciably more dirt and scratch sensitive
than CDROMs, but YMMV.

I think this issue becomes much more prevalent with regard to rental
DVD's. While the ones we own are typically kept in pristine
condition, the one's you get at say Blockbuster can be anywhere from
brand new to looking like they have been through hell and back. I
would tend to agree that the data density of today's DVDs are
bordering on the extent of being too vulnerable to even the most
innocuous looking of scratches, smudges, or various unidentifiable
gunk. It seems that issue will only get worse in future formats
unless they retreat back to a "cartridged" medium (or perhaps
sacrifice some of that tremendous data capacity for some hardcore data
redundancy/correction capability).