Panasonic DMRE85HS Progressive-Scan DVD Player/Recorder with 120 GB Hard Drive Recording
Unsuitable if you are builiding a digital library from VHS
I bought this unit to convert my massive VHS tape collections into a digital library.  After a month of experimenting, I concluded this was not suitable for my project.  The critical factor for me was to record analog tapes to the unitfs HDD, and eventually to DVD as efficiently as possible.  I owned close to 10 VCRs in the past and never had trouble figuring out how to use them, but this E85H was an exception.  I had to read the manual from cover to cover for a couple of days to get started.  Operation of this machine is not user friendly, although it feels okay once you get used to it.   <br /> <br />Setting up the TV channels was troublesome from the beginning to the end.  It has TV guide recording, but in order to use this feature, you need to run automatic channel scan.  It kept skipping a channel that I needed most, while picking up useless channels that do not have any signals.  I could run manual channel scan to add the channel, but then timered recording by TV guide system does not work. <br /> <br />I wanted to record 6 hr VHS tapes into the HDD by one shot.  The idea was that I let the VCR and E85H running while I am absent from home so that I can edit when I come back.  That did not work, not always, but many times.  The recorder stops when it encounters no signal condition for 10 seconds or so.  Chances are that you have no signal conditions or interrupted signals in your VHS tapes in several places if you taped over programs a few times.  Also, the recorder has a guard for copy protected materials.  It stops recording when it senses copy guard signals.  The unit stopped many times by error saying gcopying of this material is not allowedh while I was recording my own home videos. <br /> <br />The quality of pictures was problem for me, too.  I found that recording mode SP (2hrs/4.7G) was good, but LP (4hrs/4.7G) was unacceptable for too much noise.  I was thinking that I would need one and half DVD disks to convert one VHS tape, but turned out that 3disks were needed to maintain the quality.  I could get much better quality when I capture VHS by my computer for the same bit rate.  E85H has a flexible recording (FR) feature if you choose not to use SP/LP/EP, such as 3hrs/4.7G or whatever the odd rate.  You can transfer videos from HDD to DVD at high speed using these preset modes, but to use FR, the video has to be transferred at normal (1:1) play speed.  The high-speed transfer is quite painless, but FR is too SLOW. <br /> <br />It is strange that this machine does not let you use DVD-RW.  It only takes DVD-R and DVD-RAM.  DVD-RAM disks and RAM compatible drives are so rare to find now.  My unit refused to format DVD-RAM (made by Panasonic, so it is not a compatibility issue) disks.  This essentially took my options to use re-recordable media away completely.  That was when I concluded that I had enough frustration with this machine. <br /> <br />I completely agree with other reviewrs' frustrations.  I donft say it is a bad recorder, but it was not suitable for my kind of use.  At least it did not meet my expectations. <br />