I bought one of these turkeys from CostCo a few weeks ago and am coming to grips with it. I chose it mainly because it is one of the few that actually has a built-in tuner (I do not have cable or satellite). It does an okay job of recording OTA high-def to DVD for later playback, which is the main thing I wanted it for. I guess my main gripe is that playback is always small-screen - I don't know the exact size or aspect, but there is a lot of black around the image, unless I zoom in and then it is so distorted as to be pretty much unwatchable.

Question - if I were to hook this up to an HD tuner and use *that* for the input signal instead of the on-board tuner, would I get better results? Like real 16:9? Or at least full-height?

(hope this post makes sense)

Best,
Ed

You should get full screen if recording a full 16X9 image. The only time you should get the bars on the side is if the program is broadcast HD but 4x3. Occasionally you will get the postage stamp effect, if recoding a HD program, that is broadcast in 4x3, and the 4x3 image has been letterboxed. Really irritating. But that is the broadcast, not the EZ-47's fault. If this happens then Zoom on your TV is your only help.
If you are not getting full screen then maybe in your setup you have not selected 16x9 for your display type. You should also select stretch 4x3 to fill screen(or whatever they call it in the setup). If you do this you should get the full 16x9 image, assuming they are broadcasting it.
I use -RW's and -R's, but all disc types will record the whole image, it's just that only RAM's will set the 16x9 bit, so you will not get vertically stretched image when viewing disc on a 4x3 TV.
Good luck.