This is a final response to my thread "DVD Recorder Blues" posted below on 9/11/03. Thanks to the kind responses of many DVDTalk.com readers, I could pretty much figure out what was going wrong with my home DVD recording.

First of all, a person can not expect superb "DVD quality" from a stand alone home recorder using a 4.7GB storage medium. Especially at any recording mode slower than SP (120 min.) - beware. Another "viewing quality" problem for me is that my new Sony Plasma TV has an "Auto Wide" feature than will automatically "stretch" any video signal to fill up the entire 32" 16:9 wide screen. Picture resolution can suffer if the original input signal is standard 4:3. Therefore, for me, the path to decent DVD recordings was two-fold: 1) Speed up the recording speed as fast as you can go - SP should be minimum. I'm mostly interested in recording NFL football for later viewing, so I bought a few Victor DVD-RW Double Sided 9.4GB disks. I set my recorder in the HSP mode, and flip sides after 90 minutes. At HSP speed, the recordings look very, very good - legendary DVD quality. Only on the wide angle camera shots does the quality suffer - why?? Medium and close-up shots are outstanding quality. The only bummer is flipping the disk over during recording. When I hit "stop record" - I have to wait about 20 seconds while the "info write" display is on. Then when I hit the "reject" button - it's about 20 more seconds of "info write" delay. Then when I flip the disk and close the tray - it's at least another 20 second wait for the thing to "load." This a aggravating, and I suspect such things will be speeded up in the future.

Finally, with my TV remote control I cancel the "Auto Wide" mode and just set the picture to a standard 28" 4:3 aspect ratio. Resolution and clarity improve considerably. With these two adjustments, I'm pretty happy with a DVD Recorder - especially when all the other cool "convinience" features are thrown in. I should also point out that I do my recording in our home theater downstairs where the cable tuner is located, then watch he disk upstairs in the peace and quiet of my own room (my wife & daughters do not enjoy football). The Sony RDR-GX7 disks play back wondefully in the upstairs Sony DVP-NS730P Player - even in the DVD-RW VR mode. Many thanks again for all you people who helped me with your responses to my "rant." - Phil.

I think the biggest problem with DVD Recorders is the way they are being marketed. When I was shopping for one no salesman every explained the severe drop in quality when you go past 2 hours of recording time. All I heard was DVD quality video with 6 hours per disc. This is not true.

If they would be more honest about what these players could and couldn't do it would create less problems for consumers when they get these players home.

I still don't fully understand how a single layered DVD you buy in a store can hold 3-4 hours of high quality video, but a DVD-R can only hold 1 hour. I'm guessing the compression done by the home Recorders is very inefficient.

Anyway the reason for the quality problems is bitrate and resolution (same as with commercial DVDs). The more you try to put on a disc the more you have to lower these. Here is a list of each recording mode.

The recording modes are:

HQ - High Quaility (1 hour per side)
720 x 480 pixels - 9.72 Mbit/sec VBR
SP - Standard Play (2 hours per side)
720 x 480 pixels - 5.07 Mbit/sec VBR
SP+ - Standard Play Plus (2.5 hours per side)
720 x 480 pixels - 4.06 Mbit/sec VBR
LP - Long Play (3 hours per side)
360 x 480 pixels - 3.38 Mbit/sec VBR
EP - Extended Play (4 hours per side)
360 x 480 pixels - 2.54 Mbit/sec VBR
EP+ - Extended Play Plus (6 hours per side)
360 x 480 pixels - 1.70 Mbit/sec VBR
M8 - 8 Hour Mode (8 hours per side)
352 x 288 pixels - 1.27 Mbit/sec VBR