Panasonic DMR-E80H Progressive-Scan DVD Player/Recorder with Hard Drive , Silver
It's great until the warantee expires
The hard drive has taken to crashing, and needing to be formatted, about once a month and the technician at Panasonic had the audacity to tell me that any hard drive, just like the hard drive on a PC, needs to be reformatted whenever a sector goes bad.  They've never heard of \\"chkdsk\\" or any similar programs and never implemented anything like it.   <br /> <br />If you need support, do not call Panasonic.  They will tell you to reboot the device, and since that can't do any harm, if you are having any problems go ahead and turn it off and then on again.  If that works, great.  If it doesn't, they can't take troubleshooting any further anyway, so don't bother waiting on hold.  You're on your own. <br /> <br />Poor maintenance design (okay, maintenance never even entered their heads during the design stages) coupled with inept technical support (should be replaced with an automatic message that says \\"figure it out yourself\\") makes this a poor choice if reliability is an issue.