UMD Care 101: Keep ’em clean

Sony made the unfathomable decision not to equip UMDs with the same sort of protective sliding shutter MiniDiscs come with.  This means that UMDs are far more damage-prone than MDs could ever be.  So users have to make a constant effort to keep their UMDs as clean and fingerprint-free as possible.

UMD cleaners generally fall into two classes, the simple sort you operate by hand and the somewhat more complex motorized ones.  In general the hand-operated sort are cheaper than their motorized competitors, but some people believe that it’s far from feasible (or even reasonable) to clean UMDs manually, so they go for the battery-operated sort of cleaner like the one pictured at right (which, by the way, is manufactured by Digital Innovations).  

In order to get the most out of your UMDs, make sure to keep them as pristine as possible, and be gentle with them.  (Manhandle them badly enough to scratch them or worse, and no amount of cleaning’ll be enough to save them).
Sony made the unfathomable decision not to equip UMDs with the same sort of protective sliding shutter MiniDiscs come with.  This means that UMDs are far more damage-prone than MDs could ever be.  So users have to make a constant effort to keep their UMDs as clean and fingerprint-free as possible.

UMD cleaners generally fall into two classes, the simple sort you operate by hand and the somewhat more complex motorized ones.  In general the hand-operated sort are cheaper than their motorized competitors, but some people believe that it’s far from feasible (or even reasonable) to clean UMDs manually, so they go for the battery-operated sort of cleaner like the one pictured at right (which, by the way, is manufactured by Digital Innovations).  

In order to get the most out of your UMDs, make sure to keep them as pristine as possible, and be gentle with them.  (Manhandle them badly enough to scratch them or worse, and no amount of cleaning’ll be enough to save them).