Scratched screen tips

[Savage Shadows]

I thought this might be a helpful thread to start (haven't seen others, but sorry if there is already another somewhere).
Here's a thread that may prove useful to some.

Have you ever, for some reason, not protected your screen? Even without any serious scratches, you still end up with an annoying amount of stupid micro scratches. But what can you do about it? It would seem too late to start protecting it. Replace the screen? Nah, too much hassle.

But what if I told you that protecting your screen now anyways is actually a very viable temporary solution?

My previous phone looked terrible, and I didn't want it to get any worse. Being friends with chairman and former president of ZAGG, I naturally went with an invisibleShield.

Surprisingly, I could no longer see my scratches!! While not a fix, I had found a solution.

I don't know if this would work with hard protectors, but it should work with any soft protector. Just wanted to share this tip, and start a thread asking, what are you scratched screen remedies?

 

[Speed Daemon]

Being friends with chairman and former president of ZAGG, I naturally went with an invisibleShield.

Surprisingly, I could no longer see my scratches!! While not a fix, I had found a solution.

I don't know if this would work with hard protectors, but it should work with any soft protector. Just wanted to share this tip, and start a thread asking, what are you scratched screen remedies?

First off, could you tell your friend that they really need to sell their wipes in bulk packages? If they did, a lot of offices, medical facilities and call centers would probably buy them by the box. IJS

Scratches look bad mainly because of the wide differences between the refractive indices of air and the hard surface that's been scratched. Your scratches look better because the soapy water that's used to stick the protective coating to the glass has a refractive index that's a lot closer to glass than it is to air. It's not perfect, but it's good enough, kind of like the kits that you can use to repair divots and small cracks in car windshields. They're good enough if the damaged is in a place where you're not looking through all the time, but not so great if it's right where you look down the road.

I've been wearing Ray-Ban "teardrop" aviator sunglasses and shooting glasses for most of my life. These aren't exactly cheap, so when the inevitable scratch happens, I take them in to one of those "while you wait" glasses places to get the scratches repaired. Since they're not prescription lenses, they can grind down the glass to remove the scratches, and then polish the lenses back to a uniform (albeit thinner) surface. Paying $100 is worth it for a $200 pair of sunglasses.

I've tried all kinds of viscous but optically clear oils to make CDs and other optical media readable, if only for long enough to make a perfect rip. Unfortunately the oil makes a mess inside the drive, so I'm looking at something better. Right now I have a selection of headlight repair kits that I'm hoping to use the next time I encounter a damaged disc. I have a product called "d_skin" that is a protective coating for 120mm discs that might help too.

I had a cheap watch that I really liked, but it was so cheap that spraying bug repellant on my arms while I was wearing it melted the (plastic, obviously) crystal. I tried dry buffing with a Dremel tool, but that went too far. I tried again using liberal amounts of rubbing compound, then buffing compound. It took some time, but the wet compounds did the trick.

For minor scratches, I'd start off with rubbing compound, a good clean cloth and a lot of patience. First rub, then buff, and finally polish. It's just like doing body work on a car. The whole trick is picking the mildest abrasive that works, and getting finer and finer until you have a mirror finish.