The image quality at 2-hours is great and watching/recording from cable is fine, however, I have noticed that when watching and recording from my vcr through the recorder, the video is far brighter. Has anyone else noticed this? When watching/recording from another dvd, it goes through a phase shift, where it seems to get slightly brighter, then drops back down to the darker. Is this normal for most recorders, normal for this one, or just something wrong with the drive? The odd thing is that the watching and recording normal cable tv through the vcr using a composite connection works perfectly fine.

I tried it with and without the MV hack without a difference in that brightness problem. The unit also had an initial firmware version of 1162, with the 3-hour mode enabled, (and gives the jittery video every once in a while,) but I haven't been able to find information on an 1162 firmware version anywhere. The unit is an older April version as well.

The last thing I noticed was that it uses Memorex DVD+RW 2.4x perfectly fine, but when I try Memorex DVD+RW 4x, it makes almost crunching sounds, (it sounds very bad,) and will either stop automatically after a few minutes, or won't stop properly, but either way it seems to leave the disc blank.