Does anyone know if permanent marker causes damage to pressed CDs over time? Today I went to buy and pick up someone's 300 disc Philips CD-i collection (no jokes ). Although everything looked absolutely mint condition at first glance, I almost started crying as I discovered the guy had used a black permanent marker, and not the special for CD-r kind, to write sequence numbers and the size in MB (why?!) on the actual discs... Incredible but sadly very true. I kindly declined to buy anything and asked for some more time to decide. Although the marker will probably come off using one product or another I'm very much afraid the marker has caused actual damage to the discs over the last 15 years. Does anyone know this for sure? And which product is safe to use on the discs, and will it come of completely?
Yep, that's what I did! Brought a game with marker on it (not sure if it was permanent marker or nor, but it looked like it) so I gave it a rub with some isopropyl alcohol. At first, it didn't seem like it was making much of a difference, but with a bit more time and elbow grease, it was all gone!
As mentioned, permanent marker is easy to get off a CD. Damage to the reflective layer is largely an old wives tale, with little more than anecdotal evidence to support it. I don't doubt that at some point, somebody wrote on a particularly cheaply made CD-R and the solvent from a permanent marker damaged the reflective surface, but it's very unlikely. Good disks have a solid lacquer layer to protect the reflective surface from scratches, and a permanent marker probably isn't going to penetrate that. Why are there "special CD-R markers" then? Hysteria perhaps?
Thanks for all the info, i'll give that isopropyl alcohol a go (that oil method sounds too messy for me ). It doesn't damage the artwork on the cd does it? Even though the seller agreed to lower the price with 20%, it's still going to be quite a big investment so i don't want to be totally screwed here
No problems here. Now it it were printed with an inkjet printer, you might be in trouble, but no professional publisher is that cheap
We'll i just bought some of that isopropylalcohol from a pharmacy and tried it on 2 cheapass DVDs I had laying around which also had marker. I tried a qtip and a microfiber cloth dvd 1: marker completely removed, artwork is damaged dvd 2: marker still faintly visible, artwork is also damaged so I'm not having a good experience here...
No, too abrasive. The artwork should not have been damaged unless you really rubbed into it. Maybe the QTip stick hit the label or that fibercloth a little rough? I have used LiftOff2, let it soak in the marker writing for a while then wipe off with a tissue.
I used a soft cotton pad with mine, just FYI. Also, what type of CD? I was cleaning a PS2 game, maybe poor quality disks have no varnish on top of the artwork.
Because back when CD-Rs were first being made the most common solvents used in permanent markers were toluene and xylene - and either of them will attack the acrylic resin that's used as a CD topcoat. Now, most of the markers use a water based chemistry, and the ones that aren't are mostly using acetone, which is much less likely to attack set acrylic than xylene is. Having said that, you can still get xylene based markers (in particular, the "blendable" markers often use aromatic solvents), but they are no longer common.
I remember most of my markers being "Xylene Free" well before we started getting CD-Rs. Different timing in different places maybe.
I think I got my first CD recorder in about '93 when they finally got below the $1000 mark (I was in the US at the time) - and Xylene/Toluene based markers were certainly very common then, although much harder to get by the late '90s. Of course, you can still get them even now, but typically only from industrial or artists supplies, which is sort of annoying, since they always worked a lot better than the reformulated ones.
Hmm. I think we got ours in '96/'97. That explains it perhaps? Australia was much further behind and much more expensive for computer stuff back then.
i was trying with some dvds actually that already had some marker on them because they were ex rental. I haven't tried with an actual CD-i disc but I would assume its similar? I dont want to ruin any of my CD-i's to test. And it wouldn't be a 100% accurate test anyway because this guy wrote on the discs 20 years ago with whatever marker was available at the time. His marker would surely have different chemicals than a current marker, as mentioned in the thread. i just lowered my offer with 50% but at that price he's probably gonna find another buyer (who maybe wont notice what this fool has done before paying). i still can't believe it really, writing a number + disc size on 300 discs, wtf...
I would assume that all pressed discs are printed in the same way, but with the CD-i being older than the PS2, it's possible that the printing might be different... I wouldn't be surprised that cheaply-made disks like the cheap DVDs you mentioned have poor quality printing, which doesn't stand up to much compared to a PS2 game.
I find the best way to get permanent marker off of a disc is to write over it with a dry-wipe and the marker usually just wipes away, sometimes takes a few tries to get rid of all of it but it has never failed me.
