Great site you have here with lots of good info. Anyway I am fairly experienced with electronics in general but new to the DVD recorders. I plan on purchasing one in the next few weeks but have been hesitant about the quality of TV recordings. I have heard that many recorders have poor quality recordins from TV channels and my brother has experienced as well. He purchased a Daewoo recorder from Sears and hooked it up in line with our IO digital cable box. All the channels were fine when the recorder was turned off, but when it was turned on all of the channels were fuzzy and staticy. Are all like this or is it a case of you get what you pay for? I saw that the Toshiba dr4 is great and very cheap but are there any other recorders that are good quality for about $150? Thanks for the help.
I bought a Toshiba D-RW2 about a week ago and there are no channel quality problems.(and i am very picky by the way!). It only cost 129 bucks. Your brother may have a defective unit or it is a poor quality brand. One thing though, you need to choose decent quality recording modes. There are 1, 2, 4, 6 , 8, and 10hour modes. Anything lower than the 4 hour mode will yeild low quality results. To help improve the signal, you may ask your bro to use S-Video cable from the output of the digital cable box to the input of the DVD Recorder.