Panasonic DMR-E95HS Progressive-Scan DVD Recorder with 160 GB Hard Drive
TV Guide On Screen does not work, otherwise a decent machine
Based on other reviews here, we decided to hook up the machine directly to cable and skip the cable box, sacrificing our digital channel lineup for now since we hardly watch any of those channels.    On our first attempt to download listings by hooking up the machine and leaving it off overnight, we received 7 sets of listings from our zip code, when in fact there are 9 sets if one consults [...]  Naturally, our lineup is one of the missing two.  Panasonic's tech support says they would put in a \\"template request\\" for our lineup with TV Guide and get back to us within 2 business days.  Still waiting, 4 days later.  Called today and got a very rude support person who said \\"keep waiting.\\"    Even worse, when I performed the laborious process of setting up all the channels myself, the next time we left the machine off to download new information, it WIPED OUT all the work I had done and put it back to the \\"select one of these 7 lineups or no match page.\\"  The first tech support person I talked to said, \\"Yes, we've heard reports that this happens sometimes.\\"  There's no solution for the bug and no firmware fix.  This may be a problem ONLY WHEN you cannot select a channel lineup and have to pick \\"No match.\\"  I don't know.    I also found online a suggestion to reset the TV Guide settings and try again \\"from scratch\\" by holding down the up and down channel keys on the front of the machine (not the remote) to wipe out the TV Guide information.  DON'T DO THIS!!!  Now, when I turn the machine on each morning, instead of giving me even the 7 channel lineups I saw before, it says something like, \\"Attempt to download listings failed.  Please make sure you have the cables connected properly.\\"  This, despite the fact that nothing has changed about how the machine is hooked up.  Today's tech support person said, \\"Maybe this is a TV Guide problem too\\" and would not offer any further assistance.  I think there is something wrong with the machine in this regard.    One other solutionoffered was to \\"try another zip code\\" -- won't work for us because we live way out in the country and our cable provider is local; no other provider in a neighboring community is going to have this same lineup.  And the last solution, which we will try this weekend, is to hook up the machine WITH the cable box.  The tech said that sometimes the machine can find the listings on the cable box itself instead of downloading them directly from TV Guide.  This sounds iffy to me because of all the people who have said the machine tries to download even with a cable box in the mix, but we'll give it a shot.    Recording works great, quality is great, and transferring taped content onto the hard drive and editing same is very easy.  My overall review:  If you HAVE to have a working TV Guide, buy a Tivo or a Replay.  If you can use the DVR without the TV Guide as a glorified VCR, then this machine is okay.    I haven't decided whether or not to keep mine.  If the IR blaster works to control the cable box, and we can at least use the cable box's version of TV Guide, I might keep it.  Manually specifying what we want to record is no different than what we were doing with the VCR, and we get the advantages of the hard drive storage and the ability to transfer and edit from our videotapes.    Overall I'm disapointed though.  Panasonic ought not to be selling something that doesn't really work, and without the TV Guide feature this thing really isn't worth what I paid for it.    UPDATE:  We tried hooking up the machine with the cable box.  It worked, and the IR blaster of the DVR does control the cable box -- this is essential, otherwise we would not be able to program the DVR to record a certain channel on a certain date and time.  However, the DVR's TV guide still does not work, so there's no such thing as \\"one touch recording\\" with this machine (at least for us).  It still presents the same 7 listings every morning and still wipes out any channel customization that we had donethe previous day.  Panasonic's tech support has never called back.  I suspect that if we COULD pick a lineup from the list, the TV Guide would work well.  We succeeded in burning and finalizing a DVD that played fine in a Playstation DVD player, so that part of the functionality works as advertised.