世論 What Japan Thinks

With a story last week about cigarette smoke clogging up the laser on the Wii, this is a timely survey reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by goo Research into faulty DVD playback devices.

Demographics

Between the 31st of January and 1st of February 2008 1,095 members of the goo Research online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.9% were male, 17.5% in their teens, 19.4% in their twenties, 15.9% in their thirties, 17.0% in their forties, 18.4% in their fifties, and 11.8% aged sixty or older.

As I only own less than half a dozen DVDs and haven’t watched any of them for months if not years, I can’t say I’ve ever had a problem with DVDs.

Oh, and if you’re coming here via a Google search for the keywords in the article title, sorry to disappoint you!

Research results

Perhaps surprisingly, about 97% of the sample owned a DVD playback of some sorts; this covered everything from a stand-alone player to a PC DVD drive. Out of the total sample, 392 people or 36.9% had had a problem with one or more DVD not playing back.

Q1: If your DVD player stopped playing back DVDs, what did you do? (Sample size=392, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Use a lens cleaner (to SQ1)	151	38.5%
Cleaned the DVD disk (to SQ2)	139	35.5%
Sent the player to the maker for fixing	72	18.4%
Didn’t do anything in particular	69	17.6%
Bought a new player	44	11.2%
Sent the player back to the shop I bought it from for fixing	40	10.2%
Fixed the player myself, family member fixed it	35	8.9%
Researched on the internet and fixed the player myself, family member fixed it	29	7.4%
Fixed the damaged DVD	24	6.1%
Friend fixed the player	12	3.1%
Threw the player away	12	3.1%
Other	28	7.1%

Q1SQ1: After using a lens cleaner, could you play back your DVDs? (Sample size=151)

Could play back	25.2%
Couldn’t play back	20.5%
Sometimes could, sometimes couldn’t play back	53.0%
Don’t know	1.3%

Q1SQ2: After cleaning your DVDs, could you play back them back? (Sample size=139)

Could play back	28.8%
Couldn’t play back	17.3%
Sometimes could, sometimes couldn’t play back	51.8%
Don’t know	2.2%