Panasonic DMR-EH50S DVD Recorder with 100 GB Hard Drive Recording
Not worth the price
This was the first DVR recorder my fianc and I had purchased. We wanted something besides Tivo and decided to go with this. We bought it in October 2005 and at first it seemed great. We were a little wary of the bad reviews, but everything was working fine and we loved it. But then around January it started acting up. <br /> <br />The TV Guide listings weren't updating as frequently and so we switched to manually scheduling shows to record. That worked fine for a while, but then it wouldn't record a lot of the scheduled shows unless the DVR was turned on...we think it was downloading the TV Guide listings during the times it wouldn't record. Turning off the TV Guide solved that problem. And then a few weeks after that, it began recording the PBS station instead of the stations it was scheduled for - if it was scheduled to record channel 6, the display showed it was recording that channel, but it was actually recording PBS. It became so frequent that whenever I had a show scheduled, I had to check it and make sure it was recording the correct channel...very inconvenient for a machine we paid a lot money for to be more convenient than a VCR.  We knew that the DVR looks to PBS for the clock settings, so we changed the clock setting to \\"manual\\" instead of \\"automatic\\" and now the PBS problem has been solved. <br /> <br />Panasonic customer service was absolutely no help. When I would call, I'd be on hold for so long that I would just give up. I tried their website and tried several times to fill out their customer service form, but it never worked - I'd hit the \\"send\\" button and nothing would send. I managed to get a direct email address for their customer service, but I would just get an automated response telling me to use the online form. Frustrating! <br /> <br />Dubbing things to DVD is very easy and nice, but considering everything else I think this product still needs more improvement to be worth the price. It's annoying and inconvenient having to schedule everything manually and then go back and label all the shows manually.