Jason, Thanks for the info. I don't understand why the external recorder video is so [censored] compared to the viewfinder. Shouldn't it be an exact replica of what you are seeing?
When I record a video on my phone and then send that video to someone else, the quality is the same.
It's unreal how terrible it is...like I mentioned, the Pulsar XD50 video is way better and that scope has much lower resolution.
I agree Doc but what you have is a lot of possibilities of why it's so bad. I'm sure I'll leave something out but I'll try to hit a few of the more obvious/likely problems and some of this is speculation.
1) We don't know what the quality is of the video feed that IR Defense is sending to the video out port on the scope. This could 95% of the problem and I highly suspect it is. You've got a beautiful crisp image in the viewfinder but if IRD is taking that video stream and greatly decreasing the quality before it hits the video out port, there is nothing that any video recorder can do to make that image look good. Want to find out if that is the problem? Find a way to hook up the MKII to your big screen HDTV and see what the quality of the live video looks like. If it looks really nice, sharp, crisp and no grain, then we've ruled that problem out. Either way, I think I can say with a pretty strong assurance, whatever the video quality is that's being sent to the video out port, it's definitely not the same as what's the user sees through the viewfinder.
Also, the next logical question is, why would they downgrade the video before sending it to the video out port? One reason is because it would likely use a larger amount of system resources and processing power to supply the video out port with the same full quality feed that the viewfinder is seeing. That's just one possible reason.
2) Anytime you physically cut an analog video stream and then reconnect it using physical connectors, there is going to be some video quality loss. For every connector introduced, the quality is going to downgrade some. The old analog connectors like the 3.5mm stereo (headphone type) jacks and RCA connectors will definitely degrade the video quality a little bit as well. If you hook up a video cable directly to the IRD video out port, that's one connection and then you have another connect where the cable connects to the MDVR. Again, this isn't going to be a major problem but it could definitely be a small cause of some lack of video quality.
3) You are recording the video to an SD card. Again, this is a place for some downgrading of the quality to occur. I'm sure it's minor but coupled with the other 2 issues listed above, it's not helping the problem. We also don't know the exact process the MDVR uses when the video feed comes in. There are things that unit could do to unintentionally downgrade the video quality ever so slightly.
All in all, that's a whole lot of speculation but I've used the IRD units myself with the MDVR and seen exactly what you are talking about. I'm confident the issue is with the video stream quality that is coming out of the unit itself.
Sorry for the long rambling post, I hope that helps a little.