Panasonic DMR-E80H Progressive-Scan DVD Player/Recorder with Hard Drive , Silver
Can't go back to VCR
I had been waiting for DVD-recorder/HDD combo to come out for over 2 years. I had been following the market in Japan since DMR-HS1 and when HS2 came out, I almost bought it. The only thing that held me back was the 40GB HDD that some people seemed to be saying wasn't enough.<br />So when this DMR80E came out in Japan, I couldn't wait for it to come out here. And as soon as I found out it was out, I ordered it and have had it for 3 weeks.<br />This was exactly what I had been waiting for!<br />We record shows regularly and had been using VCR which was really irritating me for the following reasons:<BR>- searching for the right location in tape<BR>- tapes not long enough (I even used those 10hr tapes<BR>  but when I'm out of town that wasn't enough to<BR>  hold all the shows)<BR>- rewinding (imagine how long it takes to rewind that 10hr tape)<BR>- need to worry about overwriting<BR>- can't figure out what's in the tape unless i play it back.<br />All these problems are solved with the HDD.<br />I guess Tivo/Replay is the same and I did consider buying one previously, but I just couldn't agree to the subscription based business model. I know which shows I want to record, so why pay monthly fee (or ont time lifetime fee) for the service? And how many times would the thing really record shows I like that didn't know about??? Besides I have enough stuff shows to watch regularly that I don't need the machine to tell me about other shows.<br />Anyway, the DVD-RAM/R is handy for shows that you want to keep around. You shouldn't leave stuff on the HDD if you don't want to lose them. So the other reviewer concerned about the warnings should not be because ANY HDD based electronics has potential data failure against power outage.<br />Regarding DVD-R compatibility warning, I think that can also be said true for any DVD-R drives because some older DVD drives don't read DVD-R disks properly. Most recent models should be ok, but I think there's always that risk. Oh, be sure to turn on the DVD-R compatible mode when recording if you want to play it back on other players.<br />One note is that if you want to record stuff from HDD to DVD without re-encoding (ie loss of quality), you need to use the fast copy mode. You had to turn on the DVD-R compatibility mode in order to do this.