Panasonic DMR-E80H Progressive-Scan DVD Player/Recorder with Hard Drive , Silver
I love this machine!
I've had this machine for over 2 years and I love it. It's completely eliminated any need for me to EVER use video tapes for any reason. Simple and logical to use, record everything to the HD first, then edit it nice and neat and burn to disc.<br /><br />I wanted to put in a review though specifically to comment on what some other reviewers have said. Someone said they encountered the 'recovery' & 'bye' issue when a burn failed, and that happens sometimes. Especially if you clog up the HD with files, it can have a minor heart attack, but that doesn't mean the machine is broken, it doesn't need to be fixed. Just erase the problem file and it'll be fine again, it's very rare that this happens to me, and it's a minor annoyance compared to all the wonderful things this machine does. Clear off the HD and maybe reformat it and it'll be golden again. Sometimes if gets really confused and has a serious breakdown, I've found I might need to unplug it to just get it to quit trying to figure out what went wrong and reset, but that always works, and once it recovers it's fine again. This is a complex machine, but it's very robust.<br /><br />Regarding HD failure, that DID happen to me. All hard drives are susceptable to eventual failure, and I ran that thing into the dirt with heavy use, and it eventually failed completely. But you don't need to pay some electronics shop jerk $320 to fix it, that's a rip off. There's absolutely nothing unusual about the HD in these things. I just opened up the case, pulled out the HD, went to CompUSA and bought a new one (got a 120 of the same manufacturer cause they were out of 80's), plugged it in, closed it up, machine recognized it immediately, formatted it, and it's been working like a beauty ever since. Total fix cost was less than $100 to buy the new drive.<br /><br />My machine has been in heavy use for 2 years, and it's performed like a champ. It's needed a bit of babying sometimes, but 99.5% of the time it's the best recording machineI've ever had, and the other 0.5% of the time you just have to let it recover, perhaps give up on a file or two if they got corrupted (VERY rare, but the machine isn't broken). I won't claim it's perfect, but it's SO good the occasional weakness is so minor that I can't get upset by it.<br /><br />Hope this helps some of those who already have this machine. Don't give up on it at the tiniest hiccup. It's a tough machine and does a fantastic job if you stick with it.<br /><br />Oh yeah, one last cool thing I discovered about this machine. Near as I can tell the Panasonic models of DVR/DVD recorders are the only ones that maintain 640 x 480 resolution at LP speed. All the other brands start cutting out lines to save data space below SP, but the Panasonic stays full res, with perhaps a few more encoding artifacts, but I'd rather have some extra coding artifacts than dump entire lines of resolution. Most things look great even at LP, which allows 4:20 to fit onto a single DVD.