Panasonic DMR-E80H Progressive-Scan DVD Player/Recorder with Hard Drive , Silver
Complete waste of money for one reason...
The unit is well made.  The hard drive idea is great!!  It only works with DVD-R disks and DVD RAM disks which kind of stinks, but hey, I can live with that.  So how did Panasonic screw this one up to make it essentially worthless to me?  Well, read on...<br />The primary reason I bought this, and missed this nuance in the reviews/descriptions was that I wanted to time shift rented DVDs.  I thought I would be able to back up a limited number of DVDs to the hard drive, watch them, and then delete them later to record another movie etc.  I didn't want to buy a DVD burner and have tons of DVD media hanging around, and the integrated hard drive seemed like just the ticket.<br />Panasonic, in all their brilliance, blocked it.  You cannot copy a DVD, copy protected or not, to the hard drive unless it is a DVD-RAM disk.  I can understand not allowing someone to copy protected material to another DVD, but to block it from copying to the hard drive makes the unit a dust collector.  I went out and bought a DVD burner and use DVD+/-RW for time shifting my viewing now.<br />Another negative is that Panasonic made it so the thing won't even play any DVD with a + in it.  DVD +R or DVD +R/W, both of which work dandy on my other DVD player and in my comupter.  So I have to have a separate DVD player to read DVD +Rs I burn with my DVD Burner.  Lamo.  I can't even use the thing as an expensive DVD player.<br />This unit is just plain not worth the money unless you have a ton of VHS or taped material you want to move to DVD or if you are into video recording and want to copy that material to DVD.  That it does well.  You can also record unprotected DVD material through the analog inputs and edit it.  And finally, you can use it to record TV shows to the hard drive or DVD, but I already had Replay TV which does a much better job of that.<br />So, the lack of being able to send a DVD movie to the Hard Drive drops this puppy to 2 stars.