Panasonic DMR-E75VS Progressive-Scan DVD Recorder/VCR Combo
a so so recorder
- got mine thru buydig.com, $367 total, free shipping, took only 2 days to get to CA from NJ. very good buying experience. the unit I received is brand new.<BR>- the documentation is horrible in terms of organizing the information. just had to dive in and learn by trials and errors. Seemed like a lot of nifty features (e.g., chasing playback) are only available when recording media is dvd-ram. this sucks since dvd-ram is not supported widely as dvd-r.<BR>- easy one-touch-transfer from vhs to dvd. however recording via this procedure created a lot and I mean a lot of titles. I think it created one title for each pauses &amp; stops signals that were on the camcorder which were later got transfered to the vhs tape. During the playback of this recorded dvd, there are annoying repeats of video and audio in between transition of the titles which last about half a second. I called Panasonic tech support and was confirmed that this unit didn't have the &quot;seamless play&quot; feature which would have eliminated these &quot;hiccups&quot;.<BR>- I used the external line 2 (located in front of the unit) to connect my hi-8 camcorder and transferred my home movies to the dvd-r disks. With this method, only 1 title was created. Can't create chapters out of it unless the used media is dvd-ram (was also told by the Panasonic tech support). One dirty fix is to stop the recording whenever I want to create a new tittle out of the whole tape, so if my 2 hours Hi-8 tape transfer was stopped and re-recorded for 8 times at the time of my choosing then I would have 8 titles to edit such as creating names/labels for the title thumbnails) instead of a single title.<BR>- used dvd-r 2x (comp usa brand) - seems to work ok. However when I attempted to use a 4x dvd-r Platinum brand, the unit went into the self check mode, shut itself off and on after recording only for about 30 seconds. Not sure if this is a problem with this particular brand of dvd media or the 4x media in general. the documentation says it supports up to 4x media.<BR>- has only S-video and regular RCA inputs, no firewire or usb for mini-dv camcorder transfers.<BR>- the built-in tuners can only go up to 125 channels so using its remote control to tune digital cable channels (up to 1000 channels) is not optimal.<BR>- playing back the recorded dvd-r disk on my dvd-rom drive in my computer is a problem. None of the disk can be read. However I can view them on my other stand alone dvd players (go-video, circuit city's AMW brand). I exteneded the recording time on 1 dvd-r to record more than 3 hours of video. the result is pretty grainy, bad. and the stand alone dvd players can't read it at all, except for the unit that burned it.<br />- Not sure if other stand alone dvd burners are any better but if I had to make my purchase over again, I wouldn't choose this unit for its lack of features on dvd-r media and limited playback supports of other dvd formats (dvd+r, dvd +/-rw, etc.)<BR>- I would rate this unit 3 out of 5  base on my expectation and personal experience with it.