Panasonic DMR-ES10S DIGA Series DVD Recorder , Silver
Good visual quality, but this model has its limitations.
The DVD recording is fine, but it's limited in the amounts it can record.  Having no 3-hour mode means if a movie is even a single minute over two hours, it must be recorded at a much lower quality.<br /><br />Also, the DVD-RAM 'chasing playback' (playing back a title at the same time it's being recorded) started giving me glitches after only a couple of months and became unreliable enough not to be trustworthy.  No more skipping ads in Law and Order!  (It's all a diabolical plot....)<br /><br />Mind you, the remote and interface are MUCH better engineered and designed than the Sony DVD record with hard drive I got to replace this.  The hard drive storage space made it worth the crappy Sony interface, even though the Sony stopped interacting with the cable box after a couple of months and could never get back in synch--which meant setting all the recordings by hand, rather than using the point-and-click approach.<br /><br />And putting two two-hour b/w movies on a single disk in the four-hour mode gave quite acceptable, even very good quality.  But if you want to record more than that at one stretch, you have to be home to put in another disk--which is what drove me to buy a model with a hard drive.<br /><br />Still, this was a fine 'starter' standalone DVD burner.  And, as I said, it's easier to use than my Sony.