Why does my Panasonic E80H turn dark when it dubs from HHD?

[Bridge]

I have a question. I taped a bunch of stuff onto the hard drive. It plays back like it looks on TV. The brightness is the same. Yet, when I go to dub the videos over from hard drive to DVD the brightness drops out. You can actually see the brightness in the setup screen just before it starts to dub drop from normal to darker. Then all video that transfers over is darker. So, if someone has on a chocolate dress or something you can watch it off of the hard drive in chocolate. Then you go to dub it, the brightness drops, and the chocolate dress turns to black. So when you watch the DVD the person would have a black dress and everything that was bright and normal is now darker. The whole entire DVD picture is darker. Some stuff is so dark you can barely see what it going on. On the hard drive and original TV you can see it normal but when it dubs to DVD the brightness drops so much it looks totally different and sometimes unwatchable. They are standard analog shows from basic cable not copy protected shows or HBO type stuff. I'm very disappointed by this. I never figured something like this would happen. I wonder if this year's model E85H does it too? I wonder if I made a mistake by getting this one instead of this year's model?

[Capmaster]

That sure doesn't sound right. Check the video setup screens for things that might have gotten turned on by mistake, like filters or black-level adjustments.

What is the source?

[Bridge]

The source is digital cable box -- Monster 3 s-video cable out -- Panasonic L3 input.

I turned on the "lighter" adjustment for the input video instead of the pre-set up "darker" after I saw the problem last night. It still didn't help. Even if it records in lighter is still drops down in brightness as it dubs over. I can see it better now that I turned up the black level playback brightness by hand; but it's still showing up dark on my 3 other dvd players because it recorded everything darker on to DVD.

That was the last E80 they had at the store. I went by on Friday and even the floor model is gone. I wish I knew if the new E85's and 95's have that problem. I would hate to get rid of this one just to find the same problem with those or even worse problems. The reason I got the E80 was from all of the people here who said the E80 was a lot better than the new ones. Both in editing and bug problem wise.

[Synergy]

The source is digital cable box -- Monster 3 s-video cable out -- Panasonic L3 input.

I turned on the "lighter" adjustment for the input video instead of the pre-set up "darker" after I saw the problem last night. It still didn't help. Even if it records in lighter is still drops down in brightness as it dubs over. I can see it better now that I turned up the black level playback brightness by hand; but it's still showing up dark on my 3 other dvd players because it recorded everything darker on to DVD.

The correct settings of black level control for recording TV signals should be the darker for input, lighter for composite & S video output, and normal for component output, the default setting. Unless your cable signal is screwed up, you should get the correct recording and playback by following Panasonic's default setting on black level control. This is exactly the same setting for both the E80H and E85H. Other than a larger HDD, 4X instead of 1X DVD-R high speed dubbing and allowing real-time transfer from DVD-R to HDD. The technical differences between the E80H and E85H are not many.

[Bridge]

So I guess it's just my machine that is messed up and there nothing can be done (or at least knows how) to fix it.

I didn't think that the input lighter/darker would have anything to do with the brightness level dropping as the video dubs from HHD to DVD but I tried it.