Basically whenever I am not in DVD mode the screen is perfectly fine. However, in DVD mode the screen has a constant distortion. I've noticed it happens around the border of the screen, and if I happen to be in the movies top menu the highlighted option will have said distortion. The best was to dicribe it is a buzz or flicker around the border and around the highlighted option. I know this happens with audio when you run a power source next to the RCA inputs. When you say hardware defect I would run with that however, same problem in two different units years apart?