Panasonic DMR-ES40 DVD Recorder / VCR Combo

Purchased this in January 2005 almost solely for the VHS to DVD dub feature. My VHS tapes had, since I got my first DVD player 5 years ago, been rotting in a steamer trunk that doubled as a TV stand. I knew I would get VHS quality when I dubbed the tapes, but since a few of the tapes I own are films still unavailable on DVD I wanted to at least be able to preserve them without any further decay in quality.

"Absolutely Not, You Thief!" is basically what machine said to me. Any tape that has copyright protection on it will trigger the dubbing process to stop after several seconds. I call foul and really don't like being chastised and lectured to by products that I own. You can get around this by running the tape from another VCR to the video input, but that's just complicated and should be unnecessary. If you OWN the tape, you should be able to back it up, especially for out of print films.

If you want a basic VHS tape and DVD player you probably wouldn't be upset. The playback on the machine is decent, although I felt the audio output could use a little work, maybe be a bit louder.

Also, you are able to burn to DVD any TV shows you have recorded, or have on your DVR. I found it a great companion to my Tivo, and the DVD-R recordings are all came out perfect. Older non-copy protected VHS tapes also dub perfectly (remember, they're perfect copies of the tape--if you have an old fuzzy tape, you're going to get a new fuzzy DVD).

Still, I found just operating this recorder/player to be on clunky. DVDs almost always seemed to take just a few moments too long to load up, and even longer for other disc formats like DVD-R or DVD-RAMs. Once a disc is loaded a full screen "functions menu" always popped up prompting me for my menu language choice. You have to clear this each time by hitting a "Function" button the remote. Unnecessary and annoying.

Also, to access disc functions outside of a DVD's own menus, such as subtitle, alternate audio tracks, you cannot hit one button. Most other players have a simple "Subtitle" or "Audio" button, but on this player you have to hit "Display", pull up a menu that takes up half the screen, and scroll through the audio, video and subtitle options. Another annoyance is that I could never seem to figure out how to get the time-counter to show how much time remained on a title or chapter. A small feature to be sure, but annoying not to have. The rest of the buttons on the remote I never got used to, all very small and I thought poorly placed.

I often found myself repeatedly hitting the "Open Tray" button because it also was slow in ejecting discs (5-10 second delays). Most other buttons on the front panel seemed equally unresponsive. I gave up on the "Power" button weeks after buying it.

The VHS player operated smoothly, as there are few advanced features when involved in VHS playback.

Ultimately--after 9 months the DVD side of the machine stopped reading discs one night. Every disc inserted results in a "Cannot Read Disc" error.

So...I went down to the basement and found my first generation Pioneer DVD player in the box for this clunker. It still works fine, and I think I'll be sticking with it for a while.