Panasonic DMR-EZ27 DVD Recorder

I replaced my older Panasonic DVD recorder with this model, because I wanted to be able to record HD and digital channels that are available on my basic digital cable, and watch them on my HDTV.

It does what I wanted - it can tune in and record analog as well as digital HD and QAM (unscrambled digital cable). Since this isn't a true HD recorder, when I record HD channels, the recordings are not as nice as the original broadcast, but they still look much better than recordings of analog (NTSC) channels, which was a pleasant surprise.

Initial setup wasn't too slow (I only have about a dozen digital channels on my cable), and using the menus and scheduler are pretty easy.

I do have a few quibbles:

- The drive mechanism is a little noisier than other DVD players/recorders I've owned - you can hear it spinning, though it's not quite loud enough to be distracting.

- The HDMI connection was useless for me because when I used the HDMI input on my TV, my TV wouldn't let me change the aspect ratio - so for example if I had recorded an analog 4:3 channel, I couldn't watch it in 4:3, instead I was stuck with 16:9 so everyone looked fat. To be fair, this may be a limitation of my TV, but anyway, component looks just as good as HDMI for me, and doesn't have this problem.

- The remote has a few buttons dedicated for controlling TVs, but I tried every possible code listed in the manual for my year-old Syntax Brillian TV, and none of them worked (but I was able to program it to control my old Sony TV just fine).

- We haven't watched many pre-recorded DVDs yet, but with the most recent one, the unit kept displaying the "PLAY" icon on the screen every 5-10 minutes at random while we were watching the movie. It's only supposed to do this when you start playback, but it was doing this without us touching the remote or the unit. Hopefully this won't be a recurring problem!