I'm curious what constitutes "noticeably better quality" between the Philips R75 and the Hauppauge card. The R75 was noticeably noisy in its encodes, often adding blocks to video -- especially from VHS sources. What recording mode were you using? XP, maybe? How big is the television that you're using to preview these discs?
Hauppauge products have gotten to be more about recording TV, and less about digitizing video. So I can see where quality may be lackluster. The software alone is enough to drive you crazy sometimes, as the newer versions of WinTV are poorly coded (unstable!) compared to older ones that came on the 150/250/350 generation of PVR cards. Hauppauge is also noticeably soft at time, especially on Half D1 recording resolutions.
1. Yes, absolutely!
2. The Toshiba model number is technically correct as listed on this site, as an "RDR". But it can be mistyped, and the lack of the R makes no difference. If nothing else, it may reduce the number of people that find it on eBay, thus giving you a better than average buy price.
Used does not matter, as long as it was not in a smoking home/office. Cigarettes/marijuana/cigars destroy the optical coatings on the laser assembly, in addition to depositing crap on the electronic boards and power supply fans. Be sure it's from a non-smoking home or office.
Also look on craigslist and on Google. eBay is not the only place to buy used goodies.
3. I'd like to say yes, but the answer is complicated. The biggest issue here is the recorder you have is known to make quality worse. So while the higher end S-VHS VCRs would give you better signal quality, the recorder could still make a bad DVD. But on the other hand, a decent VHS output will look better (and stay that way) on a DVD made from the better DVD recorder.
Ideally, you should replace both the VCR and the DVD recorder, to truly get what I'd consider an archival quality from your tapes.
Another consider may need to be a timebase corrector. Read about those here:
http://www.digitalFAQ.com/forum/show...base-2251.html
You may need to look into an external TBC, to provide a clean signal to a DVD recorder at all times.
