I have a very unusual and frustrating problem. Last week, our cable company (Service Elelctric), upgraded their on screen menu, and certain settings had to be done again. When I turned on my Panasonic DVD recorder, it would go on, but continue to run without recognizing anything inside, disk or no disk. The only thing I would see would be the spinning circle and "3" indicating that it was set to record from the cable box. I could only turn if off by holding down the power button.I thought it was broken. I replaced it yesterday with a Samsung R120 which seem to work fine, confirming my first thought of the Panasonic being broken. However, to my surprise, when I turned on the Panasonic on another table (without any connections) to try and remove a disk, it opened perfectly.

Well, for the next two hours, I reset up my Panasonic, thinking it was going to work again, and found it didn't. Thinking now it must be haunted, I decided to try and isolate certain things. I rechecked all of my TV and cable settings to no avail. Finally, to my surprise, I found that when one of the connections was not in place, it would work fine. It was the connection from the digital cable box external cable to the DVD recorder cable input, leading me to believe that the signal from this cable box was interfering with this Panasonic recorder. even though the recorder was powered off at the time. Whenever I removed the cable connection, the recorder would start perfectly and the tray could open. I don't know who to call, Panasonic or the cable company. Here are my questions:

Am I imagining all of this, or is this signal actually interfering with this product?

Why the Panasonic model and not the Samsung? (They basically have the same functions?

Why did this happen this week? Was it the cable company's menu change on their digital box? It has always worked fine prior to this week.

And finally, is there a solution, or should I keep the Samsung and spend the extra $150?

Thanks and good luck with this one.