SKIP-AWAY Pro Disc Repair
The SKIP-AWAY Pro is a disc cleaner that uses a soft cloth buffing wheel and heat as well as pressure to buff out scratches and dents on a disc.
Ease of Use, Performance: 24/25
Look & Feel: 24/25
Features 23/25
How much I enjoy 23/25
Total: 94/100
The Venmill SKIP-AWAY Pro is a disc cleaner for CD’s, DVD’s and game discs but not Blu-ray discs that cleans and repairs discs using heat and pressure to smooth out defects. The Venmill SKIP-AWAY Pro is easy to use and cleans discs or repairs them for a complete at home or small business machine to repair discs.
The Venmill SKIP-AWAY Pro is a simple machine with plenty of safety features as well as a simple to use cleaning and repair cycle. The Venmill machine works with a container cartridge called Optoclear that is a disc cleaning fluid that is sprayed on the disc surface during cleaning and repair.
Simply plug in the machine and turn it on, insert a disc and the machine will run through the clean cycle by default and with a simple press of the repair button you can change to the repair mode. The clean mode takes fifteen seconds to complete while the repair mode runs for 3 minutes with both modes automatically dispensing cleaner fluid from the Optoclear cartridge.
The disc slides into the front of the machine easily and pops into place with some internal wheels that make the disc almost snap in. Once the disc is in place a switch inside starts the mechanism for cleaning or repair and the cover closes over the disc.
The disc spins and the buffing wheel moves back and forth as it spins to clean or buff the disc, the buffing wheel is a very soft layered fabric that pops in and out of the machine easily. To remove the buffing wheel simply pull the front of the machine off using the handle and pull off the buffing wheel, the front of the machine slides easily back into place.
The cartridge is also easy to replace by turning it and pulling it out of the machine, it has small contacts on the bottom of the cartridge that tell the machine how full it is. The cartridge pushes upward to spray fluid onto the disc from the bottom and the entire process is automated for easy cleaning and repair.
Simply insert the disc and it will go through whatever cycle it is set on and you just wait for your cleaned or repaired disc, but how does it work? I had no problems cleaning discs but the real test is repairing scratches that are into the plastic of the disc.
The Venmill SKIP-AWAY Pro does a great job of taking out both light and heavier scratches but it does have its limits like any disc repair machine. The lighter scratches come out easily and even some medium to heavy ones do get repaired or fixed enough to make discs work again that were not readable.
I took a few discs that could not be read and repaired them with ease but it still could not fix a totally unreadable disc that I really think is beyond help. Small and even some heavy scratches can be repaired easily using the Optoclear fluid with the heat and pressure of buffing the disc surface.
The Venmill machine takes care of any discs except Blu-ray as the plastic coating on a Blu-ray disc is harder than other discs. I found that games such as PS2 and PlayStation discs were just as easy to clean and repair as well as CD’s and DVD’s with no problems using the repair cycle just once.
On a few discs I did have to run through the repair two or three times but this was only for the heaviest scratches with some that did not ever end up coming out. I do think the machine works very well and without any abrasives that other machines often use, the heat and pressure of the buffing wheel on the disc surface smoothes out the plastic layer for a readable disc.
The Venmill SKIP-AWAY Pro works very well and costs about $500 which is a far cry from other abrasive repair machines that easily go into the thousand dollar range. The Venmill SKIP-AWAY Pro does a great job of repairing discs that I tried it out on but again it did not fully repair all the ones I tried.