I would like to kindly thank everyone who has responded thus far.

I have tried connecting the DVD player through the VCR and had the same issues. This monitor has some kind of automatic brightness control which makes sense if you use it as a surveillance monitor as it was intended.

Here are some photos:






NOTE: the button ABC does a sort of Automatic Brightness Correction. It plays hell with subtitles and the brightness changes every few seconds. It's off.


The button near the RCAs on the front says Multi-CH-S and it changes the sound configuration from mono to stereo and then to a third stereo mode that I don't understand yet.