Panasonic DMR-EH50S DVD Recorder with 100 GB Hard Drive Recording
It's a great machine in spite of the setup hassle
I bought this recorder because of its multidrive capability and its large hard drive. I was upgrading from an aging Toshiba recorder. I'm glad I had experience working with recorders because the user manual that comes with this machine is terrible.     The TV Guide on screen setup may be a problem for you if you have a digital cable box. I have a Motorola HD cable box from Cox Cable and I was not able to download the program guide through the cable box. To get the TV guide on screen to work, I had to bypass the cable box by using a splitter. One side goes to the cable box and the other side goes to the recorder. I ran A/V cables from the cable box to an auxillary input on the recorder in order to record the digital channels.   I can record programs from digital channels by manually setting the start and stop time.    I use the TV Guide on screen program guide for the analog channels that do not have to run through the cable box. To record a program all I have to do is select the program in the guide and the start and stop times are set automatically. This is a handy feature.     In the TV Guide setup you may have a problem downloading the correct channel lineup if you live in a town with more than one zip code. I live in a town with 4 zip codes but we all have the same cable channel lineup. I could not get the correct channel lineup until I changed the zip code to a neighboring zip code.      If the channel lineup is wrong when you set up your TV Guide, you might try changing your zip code.    I use the recorder to time shift programs by recording them on the hard drive for later viewing. The recordings are excellent. I cannot tell the difference between the recorded program and the live broadcast. The editing feature of this recorder is very easy to use. You can create. start and stop points, or chapters, inside your program. For example you can divide your program into chapters separated by commercials. You can then delete the chapters you don't want.     Besidesthe hard drive this recorder will also record on 5 of the 6 formats of DVD available today including DVD-RAM. Creating a DVD-R (the format playable on the majority of dvd machines) is a two step process which is inconvenient. After you copy your material to the DVD-R, you have to go back through the menu to finalize it or it won't be playable on other dvd players. Since finalizing is essential, I don't know why they didn't make it part of the copying step.    This is a great machine well worth the time and money. I would have ranked it higher if it weren't for the TV Guide set up hassles and the worthless users manual.