Panasonic DMR-EZ27 DVD Recorder

I picked up this DVD burner in an auction for $75. At that price it's a fantastic deal. =)

What drew me in was the ATSC tuner. I have no cable or satellite so I've been picking up my TV over the air for a while now. I've gotten used to a certain amount of instability in my picture. Not any more! Now I get perfectly solid pictures with 5.1 Digital Dolby surround sound with no subscription fees. Very nice.

It has plenty of hookups. Composite, Component, S-video, HDMI, optical audio, FireWire.

The recorder works pretty much like a VCR, allowing you to schedule it to record at a date, time, and channel. The picture quality is good. It's what you expect from MPEG-2. Unfortunately, the audio always records in stereo even if you're recording a show with 5.1 audio.


The unit records on most recordable DVD formats which is nice. You can program it to record up to 8 hours on a single DVD.

The unit does have several shortcomings.

First, the display is ugly. Sure, it's visible from a distance, but they used a tall, skinny display that's just blech.

Tuning channels is slow and occasionally the unit gets confused. When you're surfing up/down through the channels, some times you'll find yourself looking at one channel while it says you're on the next channel over.

The unit has an SD card slot for looking at photos. That's not much of a sales point for me since I'm seldom far from my computers. What I really would have liked to see was the ability to record shows to the SD card so you can watch them without wasting discs.

The tuner does tune in HDTV signals but it immediately drops the signal down to SD. Still, down-converted HD is far better quality than regular SD broadcasts.

The interface throughout is pretty disappointing. At some points you type in text by rolling up and down through the alphabet. At other times you get a grid of letters all up on screen at once to pick character from. The menus are also inconsistent. Sometimes you hit the right button to select something. Sometimes you hit enter. There is a little compass graphic to tell you what your options are, but the fact that it's there means even the engineers who made this thing were getting lost navigating the menus.

To add or delete a channel you have to scroll through pages and pages of unused channels to get to the one you're trying to add/delete. Very annoying.

There's no zoom function for dealing with those HD channels that are showing SD up-converted video. Basically, this situation results in a small picture with a big black border around it because they're putting out a 16:9 image with a 4:3 picture in the middle with black on the left and right. If you play that back on a 4:3 TV, you get the left/right black and also the normal letterbox black on the top/bottom. A zoom feature would let users bring these programs back up to full screen.

This thing gets the job done but getting it to behave takes a little work.