Panasonic DMR-E30S Progressive Scan DVD Recorder
Pain to use
My friend has this unit, I used it over the weekend, and here are my thoughts.<br />The good points:<BR>The recording quality is pretty good. There were no surprises. In that area, I am satisfied. Getting the recording, on the other hand, was the hard part.<br />The bad points:<BR>This is probably the most difficult to use consumer electronics unit out there, of any kind that I have used. The user-interface was so non-intuitive that it took a lot of playing around to even figure out what to do. After I figured it out, the design struck me as so boneheaded that it seemed that Panasonic rushed this out to market at the expense of a good interface.<br />Here is why:<BR>-The manual is terribly written. It reads as smoothly as riding a bike on cobblestone. Take a look at it and you'll see what I mean. It is a poorly designed jumble of pictures, text and icons. Even the simplest task is difficult to decipher.<br />Further, the index (on the back page of the manual) doesn't even have a \\"Recording\\" section. It has ONE line item called \\"Recording Mode\\". Now, since this is a DVD RECORDER, I would think that it would have a \\"Recording\\" section with several sub sections such as \\"How to record\\", \\"Selecting the quality of recording\\", etc. Instead \\"Recording Mode\\" is the only item listed that has anything to do with recording, which seems to indicate to turn to a page which describes how to do something while the unit is recording.<br />-The remote control is terribly designed. It is difficult to navigate using the up, down, left and right arrows because they are spaced so far apart. By the way, these are integral to the usage of almost every screen activity, so I constantly found myself stretching my fingers all the time in weird ways to do even the simplest task.<br />Also, the remote control has a little \\"door\\" that you have to slide down, which reveals another set of buttons. Strangely enough, the open/close button is located under this door, which is an inconvenience since inserting and removing DVDs is central to what this unit is all about. (insert DVD, record, remove DVD, repeat). I would have placed the open/close button at the top left of the control, like most other remote controls out there. But no, with Panasonic's unit, you have to first slide down a door and then press the small button which is located in a non-obvious area.<br />The \\"play\\", \\"pause\\" and \\"stop\\" buttons are not labeled. The only indication of what these buttons can do is indirectly suggested with a small graphic on the center of the buttons. The play icon is a small triangle pointed right, the pause icon is a pair of fat vertical lines and the stop icon is a square. At first glance, that \\"seems\\" fair enough, however I tend to watch TV with the lights turned down, and at lower light levels the stop and pause button's icons look the same. All three buttons are the same size. It would have been helpful if Panasonic has made such important buttons more obviously visible. It struck me that either: Panasonic thinks that everybody who watches TV does so with the lights full on, or either they didn't think this one through. Read on, and you may agree that Panasonic fell victim to the latter of these choices.<br />-There is a button called \\"F REC\\", which allows you to specify how much time to allocate for the remaining recording on the disc. So let's say that you want to record at the slowest speed (poorest quality), which will allow you to record 6 hours to the disc, this is the place to set it. (By the way, this button is located under the little \\"door\\" that you have to slide down). Once it has been set, you can start recording from this screen. There are \\"Start\\" and \\"Cancel\\" screen buttons, which are navigated to via the up/down/left/right too-far-spaced-out buttons. Here is a representation of the screen:<br />Recording Quality/Time on disc left:<BR>X Hours  Y Minutes  <br />Record:<BR>Start  Cancel<br />If the cursor is selecting the \\"Hours\\" area, you have to pressthe \\"down\\" too-far-spaced-out button to highlight the Start graphic. Once this is highlighted, you press the Enter button (which is the button on the remote control located in the center of the up/down/left/right too-far-spaced-out buttons) to begin. Problem is, when you press the \\"down\\" too-far-spaced-out button, the unit defaults you over to the \\"Cancel\\" button on the screen, whereupon you have to then press the \\"left\\" button to get to the \\"Start\\" area. Apparently, the unit always assumes that you have made a mistake with your selection, because no matter where you are, even if you are hovering directly above the \\"Start\\" button, you can NEVER simply press the \\"down\\" button to get to your intended location. You have to press the \\"down\\" and then \\"left\\" remote control buttons. It's a real pain after a while.<br />Panasonic, in their infinite wisdom, apparently decided to \\"protect\\" the users against accidental recording by defaulting them to the Cancel button every time you want to record. Ironically, if you did accidently record something, you could simply DELETE it, but Panasonic decided that you should have to explicitly \\"confirm\\" you selections in a non-obvious way.<br />The same thing goes with Erasing a section. The unit defaults you to the Cancel button no matter where the starting point of the cursor was. This is a little more acceptable because erasing a program has more serious ramifications than recording a program, however to add insult to injury when you DO decide to erase a program, there is no *obvious* indication of what is going on during the several seconds that the erase takes to finish.<br />This next point is perhaps the dumbest design flaw of all related to on-screen indicators. Let's say you are recording a program, and you press the \\"pause\\" button to pause the recording. The on-screen pause graphic comes up in the upper right of the screen, and the DISAPPEARS is about two seconds! So, there you are, paused, with NO WAY to realize this fact because there are no indicators on the screen!<br />I'd like to add to this that for the past 20 years, VCRs have an on-screen indicator that indicates that recording is paused. The indicator is a pair of fat vertical lines that stay on the screen during the span of being paused. It's quite obvious. Why Panasonic decided to remove ALL icons from the screen when you pause a program makes no sense to me.<br />Overall, very poor design but the recording quality seemed fine. Getting that ok recording was a pain.