On Friday, May 18, 2012 10:03:15 AM UTC-4, William Sommerwerck wrote:
I don't want to get into an argument over minor points, but...

I'm a non-smoker, and have never lived in an unusually dusty environment.
I'm sure I'm hardly alone in //never// having had to clean an optical-disk
player. (This includes two LV machines, two DVD players, one Blu-ray player,
an SACD player, multiple computer drives, and I-don't-know-how-many CD
players, including portables.)

I agree that cigarette smoke and cooking vapors (especially oils) are the
most-likely cause of a dirty lens. They get there because they settle on --
then stick to -- the lens. Plain dust doesn't stick to the lens, so it can
be blown away when the disk spins.

A moving surface drags air with it. (This is why dust tends to settle in
corners -- there's no air motion at those surfaces.) This moving air should
have //some// effect on non-sticky dust. I believe Geneva (Nortronics) made
a faux CD with shallow vanes on the surface to increase the air motion. (It
should be in the garage. I'll look for it.)

In my opinion, a regularly used optical-disk player is not going to
accumulate much, if any, plain dust on its lens. I remain to be convinced
otherwise.

Another point -- has does /any/ contaminant get on the surface of the lens?
If you argue that it's pulled in by the spinning disk, then... Well, you
draw the conclusion.

* As far as I know, the optical system in most optical-disk players is a
sealed unit.

Quite often the internal portions of the assembly can be sealed. We are talking about the surface of the lens itself.

Pioneer had an interesting way of combatting this problem... Their CD players had the optics mounted upside-down. If you recall, either the tray or the cartridge for these players required the CD to be label side down. They did have another problem though, quite often, teh lens would fall out and end up inside the machine. I have many listings in my repair log for these repairs. These were frequent enough such that players that were otherwise unserviceable were canabalized for the lenses. (I still have a few in stock now.)

Dan