Philips 3355 off center recording

[stagescrew]

Just bought this Philips 3355. The store was out of stock on the Philips 642 (my planned purchase), and this one was on sale. I figured, why not? My VCR has stopped rewinding. So far every thing I have shoved in the tray plays, thats the good part. While experimenting with recording modes (HDTV OTA) I noticed the recording is slightly off center to the right. I might not have noticed, but the local FOX station broadcasts the most annoying veritcal grey bars with huge logos on 4:3 content. If the grey bars are normally 4 inches wide, the bar on the right is 3/4 inch narrower. This is recorded this way, the original broadcast has both bars sized the same. If I force the aspect ratio on the tv, it is apparent on any channel recorded. The broadcast black bar is noticeably narrowerer on the right side.

Is there some service menu I can get to and correct this?

[stagescrew]

Update-I took the recorder back and exchanged it for another, same problem, so I guess the first one was not defective. The bad news is that I noticed the display sort-of pulsating in intensity, like there was something drawing down the power supply. All recordings had erratic color shifts and video jumpiness. I'm now thinking that what ever is making the display erratic is also making the recordings poor as well. Unfortunately I erased the recording from the original machine.

I did several test recordings at different speeds with two different types of +RW media (Imation and Fuji). The one hour and two hour were not that different. The four and six hour recordings looked remarkedly worse. Both types of media had the same color/video shifting.

Did I grab a lemon or is this common for Philips?

[Barnabas]

Try updating the firmware

[stagescrew]

I already looked at their website, no updates. I emailed support and they replied with a phone number and case number to call back on. In the meantime, I took a disk and copied the video_ts folder to my computer, converted the vob files to mpeg, looked at them in VirtualdubMOD, and it seems the recorded image is not cropped, but more so the signal the recorder sends back to the display is shifted to the right.

I'm hoping the color shifting problems are as a result of cheap video cables. I'm going out to purchase some better cables now.