Panasonic DMR-E80H (80 GB) DVD Recorder

The thing that caught my eye about this unit is the combination of an 80 GB hard drive recorder and DVD recorder in the same unit. This allows you to copy your home videos or TV shows to a hard drive, which cuts out worries about putting a disk in the unit or having enough space for a 4 hour show. The hard drive also is helpful if you want to do some editing before burning to DVD. You can record to the hard drive, cut out the parts you don't want, and then burn the final product to DVD. Overall, I'm satisfied with the unit, but there are some important features that are missing. Here's the rundown:

DVD Format: The unit works with DVD-R and DVD-RAM disks. DVD-RAM disks are very versatile (and you can record/erase them multiple times), but they work in very few other DVD recorders/players. DVD-R, on the other hand, plays in virtually all of the DVD players that I've tried, but you can only burn to a DVD-R once. A tip if your DVD-R disks don't seem to work in other players - check to make sure that you have finalized them (it's explained in the manual). They won't play in other DVD players until you've selected the "finalize" option in the functions menu of this recorder. Another potential problem with the DVD formats used in the unit is that the unit will not allow you to copy from a DVD-R disk to the hard drive; you can only copy from a DVD-RAM disk to the hard drive. Essentially, this means that if you have a home movie that you've copied to a DVD-R disk and you want to make a copy of that disk (as I've experienced, with grandparents wanting their copy of the movie of the grandkids), you're out of luck. If you had the movie on a DVD-RAM disk, you could transfer the movie from the DVD-RAM disk to the hard drive, and then make copies from the hard drive back onto DVD-RAM or DVD-R disks.

Picture Quality: You can record at various speeds that will allow you to fit from 1 hour to 6 hours on a DVD. The 1 and 2 hour speeds look great - clearly better than VHS, and basically the same quality as my Mini-DV camcorder. Between 2 and 4 hours on a DVD still looked good to me, but beyond 4 hours, there was a noticeable decrement in quality. One very nice feature is the "flexible record" speed, which allows you to use the highest possible quality to fit an exact length of time onto a DVD. For example, if you have a 3 hour family home video, this recorder will burn 3 hours to the whole DVD at the highest possible quality, rather than using a 4-hour quality (as some other units will make you do). The hard drive claims to allow you to record 106 hours of video, but that is at a pretty poor quality (it looked worse than VHS to me); realistically, expect to be able to put about 25-40 hours of decent-quality video on the hard drive. For most people (myself included), that's plenty.

Inputs and Outputs: The unit has the standard RCA input/output jacks as well as S-video. But there are some critical things missing here: First, this unit does not have a working TV output for coaxial cable, so if you have an old TV without RCA inputs (like I do), you can't output a picture from this unit to a TV that only has a cable input. Second, there is no input for an IEEE 1394 (iLink) cable from a mini-DV camcorder. As a result, you have to hook up your DIGITAL mini-DV camcorder to this unit using ANALOG cords. The result is a (small, but real) loss in picture quality as well as a greater hassle in copying your mini-DV home movies to DVD's using this unit. I'm not sure why Panasonic dropped this feature - they had it on their earlier model. I almost brought this unit back to the store when I saw that this feature was missing, because I really wanted to use the unit to transfer mini-DV home movies to DVD.

Ease-Of-Use: There are positives and negatives here. Overall, the unit is very easy to use - once you get used to it. It has all kinds of nice bells and whistles like titling, creating playlists, and cutting parts out of videos, and they are all pretty easy to do. However, the user's manual is not very good, and you do have to spend some time learning the stuff, although you get there eventually with a mix of the manual's directions and some trial-and-error. I have used the unit more for transferring home movies to DVD than for recording TV shows, so I can't really say much about recording TV other than that it seems pretty easy to me. The bottom line here is that you'll be a bit frustrated by the user's manual.

Using it as a DVD-Player: I've had no problems at all. The picture is very clear, and the features work fine. You can fast-forward very quickly, and the unit has been able to play any DVD that I've put in it (although I haven't tried DVD+R/+RW yet).

Reliability/Durability: I've had no problems yet (I've had the unit a few months), and I've done a lot of recording on both the hard drive and DVD recorder.