Panasonic DMR-E75VS Progressive-Scan DVD Recorder/VCR Combo
Panasonic generally makes the best DVD recorders
This product has all the flaws of what's wrong with DVD technology in general, but Panasonic makes the best DVD recorders.  The others I have bought were much less reliable than Panasonic, despite the many problems I've had.    Samsung was nearly horrible; DL DVDs never finalized without errors.  (I tried every DL DVD money could buy.)  Sony was horrible; recording using their \\"DV input\\" only worked once, and I found upon auditing the DVD there were tons of uncorrectable errors.  Recording using composite still had errors, but not as bad.  +RW disks seemed to work the best, but then over a period of months even that stopped working.    Making DVDs, even with a standalone recorder, might be slightly less burdensome than using a computer, but it still has its pitfalls.    Did you ever get used to being able to rewind those audio and video cassettes?  Well, welcome to the age of \\"high-tech\\", where with DVDs, you can only go back until you hit the end of a \\"title\\" (which, like many \\"high-tech\\" things that some illiterate engineer (or worse, marketing geek) came up with, was a completely incorrect word to use).  By \\"title\\", they're trying to say a single recording.  Sure, there's a few speeds for jumping ahead, but they don't compensate for being unable to get to the end of the previous title.    A major problem with DVDs is that when they say 1 hour, they mean 1 hour.  But those VHS you taped onto lasted 65 minutes, or 130 minutes, etc. -- so the DVD cuts off right before the climax.      Panasonic recorders, however, do have a nice feature on this.  You can use \\"flexible recording\\" (aka \\"FR\\" mode( and specify a time duration that's non-standard, and it will give you the best quality that it can for that time.  So, for your \\"120 minute VHS tapes\\", don't use the \\"dubbing\\" feature.  Set FR up to record for 130 minutes, and let it go.  I should mention that you can stop recording when in FR mode and the DVD will still be OK.  However, I should note that in FR mode, becauseyou're NOT dubbing, you'll need to provide the input from a separate VHS tape player (aka VCR), as you can't use the combo unit's VHS to play the VHS tape in FR mode.    The following is a characteristic of DVDs, it's not just the Panasonic unit:  Note that unlike VHS, you can't just erase & re-used DVD-R or DVD+R disks, whose proper name should be \\"write-once\\" disks.  Deleting a \\"title\\" on a DVD-R merely makes the surface area of the disk that the deleted title was stored on inaccessible.  So if you recorded 1 hour of programming in 1 hour recording mode onto a write-once disk, and then delete the \\"title\\" (recording), the unit will say the disk is full or unusable, though you just deleted everything off of it!    In my original review of this item, I complained loudly about the lack of keyboard for entering the title of \\"titles\\" (yes, I am whining about the misnomer; I mean recordings).  But actually, Panasonic has the best data entry and variety of characters for any DVD recorder that I have bought (& I've bought several others, including Zenith, Samsung, Sony, & maybe Philips -- I've taken so many back to the store right away, I've lost track).  My only complaint is that the title does not show as it will display in the final menu for some models of Panasonic recorders, so expect your words to soemtimes be broken into 2 lines in ways that are not proper english (no automatic hypenation into grammatically correct syllables).    If you think the box is cool cuz you're using DVD-RAM and you therefore manage to more VHS-like functionality from the unit, you'd better hope all those precious memories will be preserved forever by that same technology being around forever.  How easy is it for you to transfer those betamax tapes?  Not easy - Sony doesn't sell that equipment anymore.  VHS?  No problem!  What's the lesson?  It's: Don't go with data archival methods that only one vendor supports.  The marketing ploy of sucking you into their DVD format in order to be able to use features that should have been made available for all RW disks as well is something that would be worth more long-term if the industry followed Panasonic's lead and adopted this format -- but they haven't.    If you're buying this product mostly to \\"chase\\" shows, fast-forward thru ads, or anything like that, you're buying the wrong thing.  Buy a \\"Tivo\\" (or more generically, \\"PVR\\") box instead of this DVR, and you'll get all that, without having to hassle with any disks at all.  If you don't like subscription fees, you don't need to subscribe to Tivo.  But, even a Tivo subscription is worth it -- unless you like setting timers on recorders constantly & acting like a home librarian.  Their lifetime subscription (for the PVR's life, that is -- a little gotcha to be sure) is dirt cheap for what you save in time.  These PVRs have incredible functionality and ease of connectivity to your PC, so much so that saving anything permanently via a DVD burner on your PC (now <$100, or less than 1/3 the cost of the DMR-E75V DVR) is easier than a standalone DVR.    On my first Panasonic VHS/DVD combo recorder (DMR-E75VS; the one to which this review is attached), I only got the \\"dubbing\\" feature to work once.  The other times, inexplicably it didn't work at all, though I had the simplest of situations, such as home videos (not copyright protected / encrypted!) and both VCR & DVD on SP (so-called \\"2 hour\\") settings.  Because of the aforementioned problem of VHS tape length (time duration) generally exceeding the capabilities of DVD by 5 to 10 minutes, I have to use FR recording mode & an external VHS player rather than dubbing anyway.  (See above for more details on that.)    The VCR works OK (and unlike DVD, the rewind works whether or not you've done multiple recordings on it, and unlike some units, it's nice and fast), so if you want to save a little space by having it in the same unit, that's fine.    My remote for the unit stopped working properly because the main \\"OK\\" button died after a couple years of frequent use, which wasn't horrible reliability -- but it wasn't that great, either.  As a general suggestion that will benefit you in getting the most life for all of your remotes, I suggest you press all buttons only as hard as you have to, and do so by pointing the remote to the proper position rather than pushing harder on buttons to try to get it to do what you want.