Panasonic DMR-EH50S DVD Recorder with 100 GB Hard Drive Recording review:
5 stars (GREAT PLAYER) - THIS IS A REALLY GOOD UNIT, DONT WAIT BUY IT

ITS WORTH EVERY PENNY................
4 stars (Does the job, but not a totally polished performer) - IMO: This machine does what it is advertised to do, namely record and play back pn the hard drive or the DVD recorder, but I'm disappointed a little because it's not quite a class act machine yet. When you push a button on the remote, it can take time for the machine to respond. The various menus to set up and use the machine are spread out over the remote control. Consequently, the machine isn't that user friendly to use. The instruction manual is the worst I have ever read. So complicated to understand. Panasonic needs to invest more money in the area of user-friendliness.



Having said that, I will say that the quality of the recording is very good. At the 2-hr SP speed, the HDD and DVD recordings are essentially identical to the source material. At the 4-hour LP speed, the quality is very close to the source, good enough that the slight loss in quality is worth the doubling of time capacity. To get high speed dubbing from HDD to DVD, you transfer at the same speed rating as the original recording. Hence, if you record to HDD at SP, you transfer to DVD at SP speed, and hence the original recording must be 2 hours max in length, otherwise the machine won't let you dub at all. So to ensure your movie will make it onto DVD in high speed dubbing mode, you must ensure the original HDD SP recording doesn't exceed 2hours, LP 4 hours and EP 6 hours. If you don't need high speed dubbing, then anything is possible Record a six hour show to HDD at SP speed, then transfer to DVD at EP so that it all fits to one DVD (but beware that EP yields pretty poor image quality).



The machine isn't a TIVO; that is, you can't pause live material, replay it, than go back to live. You must record first (but you can play the recording while it is still recording).




4 stars (The First Day) - I bought mine yesterday at Circuit City. The price was marked higher than the website, but they honored the webprice. I also bought a pack of DVD-RAM to try the advanced features over DVD-R and -RW. I later found out that a free DVD-RAM comes with the product. The comments below are not meant to be comprehensive as I have only had the unit for 24 hours and am still learning to use it.



I set everything up relatively quickly. The options are to use the device connected to cable (analog cable) or to use the device with your supplied cable box (digital cable.) Without the cable box, you cannot access premiums channels and on demand items, just basic channels. I tried it both ways. While using the device as the cable tuner, it works as expected, but without all the channels. While connected to the cable box, channel selection is delayed due to the unit having to echo the remote signal through the IR Blaster attachment. In essence, I change the channel on the device and it then changes the channel on the cable box. Scrolling through the menu on the channel guide is also slow due to this. It may be best to think of the device as a VCR without the ability to record and watch TV at the same time. You can record and watch a previously recorded show at the same time, but not live TV. Also you cannot "pause live TV", you have to start recording and then start a delayed palyback to achieve this effect. In all I am happy with the purchase, but I seem to have gotten confused in my research and failed to keep all the features of other products seperate. This product is not a TIVO, but it also does not have a monthly fee.



Pros:

Easy to record programs

Thorough instructions

Great picture quality

Good recording capacity



Cons:

TV guide sluggish while connected to cable box

Can't record and watch something else, while cable box is in use.

Has cheap appearance.

Panasonic DMR-EH50S DVD Recorder with 100 GB Hard Drive Recording is the Electronics version. The full version can be purchased by clicking on the "CLICK HERE TO ORDER" button below for around  389.99USD.