freeview is crap?

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think it actually does that. The color gun controls were 'greyed out' when I selected the scart input

yes. Its a dvd player with vhs recorder as well.

ANYWAY very interesting tonight. Got pretty good quality on BBC4, then switched to BBC1 for 10 o clock news and it was beyond belief bad! really overcompressed. swapped between tv ONLY anlaogue and full digirtal, and teh digital was dreadful.

So it seems what I am seeing is very much a function of what is being transmitted on digital at the time. I guess they drop the bitrate for news.

I got slightly better channle 5 on digital than analogue this time. Weird.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I don't use the VCR socket. TV goes to DVD/VHS input, which is marked 'satellite input' and output of DVD/VHS goes to TV.

It seems to record off SCART/RGB allright.

Its says it just pases the SCART signal through when its switched to 'standby'.