Panasonic DMR-E50M DVD Recorder

I thought I'd get something to replace my old s-vhs machine, so I could enjoy the same or better picture quality, plus more flexible editing. I paid $800 Canadian, which is about $575 US.
However, for starters, the picture quality was not as good as my s-vhs machine. The picture quality was very close to my s-vhs machine, except that there sometimes is an odd thing happening with the colors, giving it an unreal quality. For example, in one case, I noticed that a patch of skin on a person's face had a blue, watery metallic looking effect, and the patch changed shape and size as I watched it. I looked at the same picture on my s-vhs machine, and noticed that the face had a very small area of blueish tint, but it looked natural, not washed out, and since it looked like a natural occurrence, it wasn't noticeable. I only noticed it because I wanted to see how that face compared to the picture from the dvd recorder, and I was looking to see where this strange blueish effect might be coming from. The dvd recorder seemed to take this small blueish area, make it bigger, wash out the color a bit, and change it's size as I watched it. It also made the affected area look a bit more 2 dimensional, as opposed to a good, defined picture, which will help make your brain think 3d. Well, that's the best I can describe it. When I returned the unit, as I was explaining the problem, the salesperson seemed to understand right away what it was and had a name for it... I forget what he called it. Anyway, at first I thought this was a problem with the recording ability, but it's something to do with how the machine is receiving or processing the signals. This is important to consider because it means that the DMR-E50 might be capable of recording more accurate video than my s-vhs machine, but in my case, the s-vhs machine showed me the better recording. I have a digital box with both a coax and s-video output. I gave the best opportunity to the dvd recorder by connecting the s-video to the recorder, and connected the coax cable to my s-vhs machine. Without recording anything, I changed the incoming signal on my tv back and forth, from monitoring the picture on my s-vhs machine, to the dvd recorder, and I saw the strange effect was still coming from the dvd recorder, without playing back any recording... It's possible that other panasonic dvd recorders of the same model don't show this odd effect, but I can only report my experience. Plus, another thing I noticed is that when I bring up the tv guide on tv screen, as far as I could tell, the signal coming from the s-vhs machine kept the lines on the menu screen perfect, but viewing those same lines from the dvd recorder, I saw they were a bit choppy or fuzzy. I'm not a technical person so I don't know the proper terms. If you're considering buying the DMR-E50, and my observations concern you, maybe ask a current owner if they notice the same effects I did...or better yet, find one in a store to check out.

Well still, the picture quality was good enough to where I probably would have kept the machine if it made up for it by superior editing capabilities. I was looking forward to single frame accuracy, and more speed and flexibility than my s-vhs machine. I can get single frame accuracy with my s-vhs machine. It has a flying erase head. When I'm watching a show I've recorded, if I want to keep a scene, I'll record the scene onto a second s-vhs machine. To do this, I'll play my collected scenes on my second s-vhs machine until I get to the last collected scene, stop it on the exact frame I want to end the last scene at, and then I'll move the scene 3 frames forward. (I have found that when I add a scene to another scene, using my s-vhs recorder, that the last 3 frames of the first scene are overwritten, so I compensate for that by adding 3 frames onto the scene before I add another scene to it.) Then I will add the new scene onto my collection, so the transition from the last scene I recorded to the new scene, is perfect. However, if the start point of the new scene has to be accurate to within a single frame, it can take me a few attempts to get it right...because on the s-vhs machine there is a slight delay when going from the pause-record mode to the record mode, so getting single frame accuracy for the start point can be difficult. But in most cases, I have found I don't need to get single frame accuracy for the start point of a scene, and it's easy for me to get the start point to within about 5 frame accuracy. To get the effect I want, it's usually the end of a scene which requires the most accuracy. That's because when your collecting scenes, it's important to end the scene on a "high energy" level, so that the energy can carry forward into the next scene. Any glitches of any kind during the scene transition, take away from that energy, and so watching the collection won't be as enjoyable. Anyway, I was expecting to have the same accuracy with the dvd recorder, and expected it to be easier and faster, since there is no tape to rewind or fast forward. Looking at the editing window, it suggests that it's easy to get single frame accuracy for both the start and end points of a scene, without having to compensate by adding frames, but that's not the case.. but that was still ok, as I thought that I could compensate for that the same way as I compensate using my s-vhs machine. I did find it easier to get an accurate starting point for the scene using the dvd recorder than when using the s-vhs machine, by adding a frame or two to the start point of the scene...but that's just when making a play list on the same disk. I don't know how difficult it is to get single frame accuracy when recording something onto a disk from another source, like for example from another dvd or s-vhs machine. I didn't get that far because i decided to take the machine back after I found the next problem. Anyway, after some practice, I could end a scene on the frame i wanted to by adding some extra frames onto it, but when i did that, the sound fades out for the last second or so. I don't know if it happens every time, but it does happen. To keep the sound from fading out at the last second, I have to add more frames onto the scene, but then the video won't end exactly where it should. For some scenes the sound won't be a factor, but for many scenes it will.
Plus I should also say that with the s-vhs machine, I know I always add 3 frames. I didn't experiment enough with the dvd recorder enough to know if you can always count on adding the same number of frames to the scene, or if it varies. It might be consistent, but if the number of frames you have to add varies, then that would be an added frustration.. but I didn't pursue that question, as I found the sound glitch was unacceptable so at that point i called it quits and packed the recorder up and took it back.

Also, let's say you record a program and want to keep a 5 minute scene, and want to get rid of the rest of the recording, to free up space on the ram disk. I couldn't see a way to keep that scene on that same disk, while erasing the rest of the disk. I thought you might be able to do that with ram disks, but as far as I could tell, you can only erase a section from the point where you started to record, to where you pushed the stop button. So for example, if you record a one hour program on a dvd ram disk, at the highest quality setting, it will take up the whole ram disk. Now if you see a 5 minute scene you want to keep, you can't ask the recorder to keep that 5 minute scene and free up 55 minutes of recording time. If you want to keep that scene, you have to record it to another disk or tape. Then you can erase the original hour long recording and reuse the disk. Now if while recording your hour long show, you stop and then restart the recording every 5 minutes, you would then have 12 5 minute sections, and then you could erase any one or more of the 5 minute sections to free up space on the disk... but who wants to stop and start the recording every few minutes. Now I returned the machine on the 4th day and during that time, I didn't go over the whole manual very carefully, so I might have missed where it explains how you could keep a selected scene from a one hour recording and erase the rest...so if that feature is important to you, it might be a good question to ask other people who own one.

Well when I found that out, i still thought I could use the dvd recorder by recording a scene from one recorder to another recorder. I thought I would add a few seconds to the start and end time of each collected scene, and then when I had filled up a ram disk with favorite scenes, I would then use the play list function to edit the scenes down to single frame accuracy. But as I mentioned, I took the recorder back because when trying to edit the scenes to single frame accuracy, the sound fades out during the last second or so.

Now I could have copied a scene from my s-vhs machine to the dvd recorder, to see how easy it would be to get single frame accuracy that way. If that was easy, then I could transfer favorite scenes from my s-vhs machine to the dvd recorder, but that would be similar to what I can do with 2 s-vhs machines, and because of the picture quality issue, I didn't bother to pursue that method to see how it would work.

So I decided that I would rather have 2 quality s-vhs machines with flying erase heads than 1 dvd recorder and one s-vhs machine, or even 2 dvd recorders. Plus, s-vhs tapes cost less than a dvd ram disk, so I can get 2 hours of video on a s-vhs tape for less money than it costs me to get one hour of lesser quality video on a dvd ram disk. The s-vhs tapes cost about $10 Canadian, and the ram disks cost about $15 Canadian so that's $20 for 4 hours using s-vhs tape vs $60 for 4 hours using ram disk... that was not a factor in my decision to return the dvd recorder, but as i think it over, i think it is a factor to consider. Of course, you could use the 2 hour speed on the ram disk which would cut your cost in half but I always record at the best quality setting.

I have a good feeling about panasonic and I like the fact that you don't have to rewind or fast forward to locate certain points in your recordings. I also think some people might like the ability to make play lists, so to rearrange the order of scenes. If that is important to you, then the dvd recorder will probably be what you are looking for. In most cases, I'm not sure if I would want to bother rearranging the order in which scenes are played. If I truly enjoy a scene, it doesn't seem to matter to me, what order the scenes are in. I can go from a hilarious monty python clip to a few seconds of a high energy scene from The Matrix to a great live band performance, maybe back to a cut from The Simpsons, ect. The scenes might be a few seconds long or longer than 10 minutes. I'm more interested in having a clean, accurate transition from one scene to another, than to have the scenes arranged in any particular order. Plus if I want to rearrange my collected scenes into themes, (music, comedy, ect) that would be a 3rd generation copy, but the quality using 2 s-vhs machines would still be very good. (I did that once, by recording my live music collection onto one tape.) In that case, play lists wouldn't work well for me because I'd probably have to look thru several disks to fill up one disk containing favorite scenes along a certain theme. So right now, the best way for me to collect favorite scenes is to use 2 high quality s-vhs machines with flying erase heads and so I'm going to get another s-vhs machine instead of the dvd recorder. If something better does finally come along, I'll still be able to transfer my s-vhs collection to disk.