Panasonic DMRE85HS Progressive-Scan DVD Player/Recorder with 120 GB Hard Drive Recording
Depends on what you want to do with it
This machine is clearly aimed at the TiVo crowd, and probably works well in that application--timeshifting TV shows. It's less expensive than comparably equipped machines from Pioneer and Philips, so if that's your application, it's a good value in today's market (late 2004). <br /> <br />However, it's not so well suited to what I wanted to do with it: create DVDs from existing movies on tape and laserdisc. Yes, the recorded image and sound quality are excellent, although the user interface is needlessly complex. But there's a fatal flaw: it's impossible to create a chapter menu of the type seen in every commercial DVD. <br /> <br />Oh, you can add chapter stops--that's pretty easy--and when the disc is played on a conventional player, pressing the chapter skip buttons will jump you from one to the next. BUT if you press the \\"Menu\\" button, what you get is not a menu of chapters, but a \\"Title\\" menu that shows a single title listing (the movie's name) and a bunch of empty listings.  <br /> <br />In short, chapters can never be shown on a menu, and you're only going to have one title showing if it's a movie you're dubbing. This is perfectly useless for my purposes. (Again, your needs may be different.) <br /> <br />Now, you can split up a movie into separate titles (just as you can split it up into chapters), and then use the \\"playlist\\" feature to combine the titles into a single disc. That way they WILL show up on the disc's menu. BUT if you do this, there will be an audio/video dropout between titles! That's unacceptable in a movie that will normally be watched straight through. <br /> <br />Bottom line: if you have a movie you want to transfer to DVD, you need to 1) add chapter stops and 2) have them show up on the DVD's main menu. With this recorder you can accomplish the first task, but not the second. <br /> <br />By the way, I find it baffling that in a $599 list price item, Panasonic omitted the ability to record audio CDs. The optical drive they used certainlyhas that capability, and it would have cost them nothing to include the feature. Not having it means that I must continue to do that job (dubbing CDs from my LPs) with a separate standalone CD-audio recorder. <br /> <br />All in all, buying this unit felt somewhat like buying an audiocassette deck...and then discovering that for no good reason, it can only record from the radio, but not from a turntable. Frustrating! <br /> <br />Andy Baird