DVD Recorders Picture Quality Questions.

Hi - I'm new here, and new to DVD Recording. I bought an ILO Recorder 05, but it was a true dud so took it back yesterday. I couldn't even get it to recognize the discs when I put them in. Before taking it back I had been reading this site about the ILO machines and when I returned 05, they just happened to have an 04 that was behind all the others on the shelf, so I grabbed it up of course. I've since run the firmware (hack version) and it worked like a charm!

Anyway, my question is this. This recorder has really poor picture quality in the longer playing modes. Is this common for all DVD recorders to have such poor quality picture in these modes or is it just the ILO that has poor picture quality? I have it hooked through S-Video. The standard play (2 hours) is really good, and 3 hours is pretty good too, but the others just plain suck! I'm disappointed because I also like to record my TV shows from satellite (comedies and such) and I prefer to cram a bunch on 1 media source. I obviously won't be able to do that now, like I used to do with my VCR.

So, are all DVD recorders poor in pic quality on the longer play modes, or is it just the ILO? Thanks!

 

 I can't see your picture so I'm not exactly sure just how poor it is. My LiteOn LVW-5005 recorders at 4hr are still better than VHS at SP and 6hr is between SP and SLP tape quality. If you want to cram lots of programming on 1 disc, maybe you should use a RW disc and dump it on your PC, shrink it with DVD Shrink, then burn it oto a +R disc

 

Thanks for your reply. Maybe I'm just over-expecting of the machine. I dunno.

 

 You're gonna have to wait until the high definition recorders come out if you want commercial DVD quality ...

 

Kim, DVD recorders are just the same as the old (never thought I'd says this) old VCR's, the longer the recording, more time on the disc, the worse picture quality. It has to cram more data, or picture in a smaller area to fit it on the disk. It's a juggling act to get a good quality picture with enough program length to make it worth putting it on disk. The highest speed on most DVD recorders (usually SP about 2 hours per disk) will give you pretty good quality, [bold]almost[/bold] as good as live, once you drop to LP (6 or 8 hour mode) you get some really rough looking quality.

RX7 Fan