Panasonic DMR-E80H Progressive-Scan DVD Player/Recorder with Hard Drive , Silver
Happy so far!
I love this thing.  Easy to use and the manual isn't that bad.  It does make some assumptions about your familiarity with the burning lingo e.g. finalizing.  I transfered all our home movies easily.  It's nice to dump everything to the hard drive in XP mode then edit and dub from there.  I use TDK dvd-r's and have had no failures.  My finalized dvds have worked on every dvd player in the house with the exception of our Audiovox portable.  They even worked on my six year old Sony player.<br />Now for the bad - 1. If you want to add titles, there is no keyboard port.  This is really, really tedious if you are dubbing multiple programs.  Title as you go instead of waiting until you are dubbing.  <BR>2.  Slow, slow, slow if you are dubbing a dvd-r.  Again, I have been dubbing alot of archived stuff, so I have maxed out each dvd-r which burns in realtime.  Dvd-rams dub at high speed which is probably what I will use once I've archived all my video. <BR>3.  The remote is a little counter-intuitive but you'll get used to it.<BR>4.  When editing programs, you can't jump to the end when shortening programs.  A little annoying when you just want to go the end to shave off extra minutes or commercials and have to fast forward through the entire segment.<br />My words of advice.  When you get it, make and finalize a test dvd and try it in any potential player.  One of the reasons I got it was to put all my kids' videos on just a couple of dvds for travelling just to find out they didn't play on the one player I didn't test on - the portable.<br />Record everything to the hard drive in XP(best) mode then when dubbing change speeds to fit the dvd.  I tranferred home videos in SP only to decide I wanted better quality and had to transfer all over again.  XP eats up the hard drive but even in XP it holds 17 hours.  You can change speeds on the dub to make stuff fit.<br />All in all, I took off a star for the clumsiness of some of the steps in making a dvd.  For the quality of the finished product, I give this recorder 5 stars.