Panasonic DMR-EH50S DVD Recorder with 100 GB Hard Drive Recording
The First Day
I bought mine yesterday at Circuit City. The price was marked higher than the website, but they honored the webprice. I also bought a pack of DVD-RAM to try the advanced features over DVD-R and -RW. I later found out that a free DVD-RAM comes with the product. The comments below are not meant to be comprehensive as I have only had the unit for 24 hours and am still learning to use it. <br /> <br />I set everything up relatively quickly. The options are to use the device connected to cable (analog cable) or to use the device with your supplied cable box (digital cable.) Without the cable box, you cannot access premiums channels and on demand items, just basic channels. I tried it both ways. While using the device as the cable tuner, it works as expected, but without all the channels. While connected to the cable box, channel selection is delayed due to the unit having to echo the remote signal through the IR Blaster attachment. In essence, I change the channel on the device and it then changes the channel on the cable box. Scrolling through the menu on the channel guide is also slow due to this. It may be best to think of the device as a VCR without the ability to record and watch TV at the same time. You can record and watch a previously recorded show at the same time, but not live TV. Also you cannot \\"pause live TV\\", you have to start recording and then start a delayed palyback to achieve this effect. In all I am happy with the purchase, but I seem to have gotten confused in my research and failed to keep all the features of other products seperate. This product is not a TIVO, but it also does not have a monthly fee. <br /> <br />Pros: <br />Easy to record programs <br />Thorough instructions <br />Great picture quality <br />Good recording capacity <br /> <br />Cons: <br />TV guide sluggish while connected to cable box <br />Can't record and watch something else, while cable box is in use. <br />Has cheap appearance. <br /> <br />