I am mainly recording College basketball games from Time-Warner Standard Def Cable in the SP DVD Quality mode on my Philips DVDR 3455/37. I then edit out all commercials and halftime on the Philips before burning to a Taiyo Yuden +/-R and/or a Verbatim DVD-R for archiving. Usually puts about 1:35 to 1:45 per game on a DVD.

Now - When I play these DVDs back on my 32" Tube Philips Magnavox TV the picture is very decent and even very good in some instances. But when I play these DVDs back on my Pal's 35" Tube Toshi, and especially on another friend's 42" Panny Plasma the picture quality varies from OK to downright awful. Is this to be expected, or is there a problem here?

I am mainly recording College basketball games from Time-Warner Standard Def Cable in the SP DVD Quality mode on my Philips DVDR 3455/37. I then edit out all commercials and halftime on the Philips before burning to a Taiyo Yuden +/-R and/or a Verbatim DVD-R for archiving. Usually puts about 1:35 to 1:45 per game on a DVD.

Now - When I play these DVDs back on my 32" Tube Philips Magnavox TV the picture is very decent and even very good in some instances. But when I play these DVDs back on my Pal's 35" Tube Toshi, and especially on another friend's 42" Panny Plasma the picture quality varies from OK to downright awful. Is this to be expected, or is there a problem here?

I haven't tested on big screen TVs, and I don't have a comparative experience of the various dvd recorders so I can't answer most of the questions.

One factor to consider is that some channels/signals are heavily compressed off the wall, so the dvd recorder will only make it worse by another round of compression. With my Comcast cable system, the Fox College Sports channels are the worse with macroblocking/artifacts in the broadcasts, while downconverted HD are the best quality wise.

Other factors affect this such as the color/texture of the court and the arena, the cameramen/women zooming or following a fast moving player at high-zoom

Thanks for your response hoops. I have definitely noticed that DVDs from the HD Games really look much cleaner even though I have standard cable only. And I have noticed games off of CBS seem to be the worst.

But I was amazed how much worse the same DVD would look on a larger TV compared to my 32" screen and wanted to tap the vast knowledge available here on this site to see if others noticed anything similar.

Thanks for your response hoops. I have definitely noticed that DVDs from the HD Games really look much cleaner even though I have standard cable only. And I have noticed games off of CBS seem to be the worst.

But I was amazed how much worse the same DVD would look on a larger TV compared to my 32" screen and wanted to tap the vast knowledge available here on this site to see if others noticed anything similar.Just for fun, try the same test using XP mode. At that bitrate you should have no artifacts at all due to the recorders encoding. If the picture still looks "horrible" on the bigger sets then it is probably an issue with the source quality.

Thanks Kelson. Good suggestion. I will give that a try.