My new toy (pic)

I wanted a DVD recorder primarily to transfer over my old home movies and other tapes that I am concerned with deteriorating but I wanted the discs to be playable in my family's DVD players. That's why I didn't put a DVD recorder in my PC, I've had horrible compatability with anything I've created with internal drives I've used over the years so went for a stand-alone DVD recorder.

Local choices sucked or were mostly PC based so I went online (limited myself to eBay and amazon.com) and decided on a
Panasonic DMR-E85H because it has a 120 gig harddrive that says saves up to 213 hours of programming in the EP mode.

This is an updated version of their previous unit which adds a larger hard drive and free TV Guide listing service. That basically gives you Tivo capabilities without a monthly charge, BUT this does not work with any satellite services (I'm all big dish, I knew before ordering I wouldn't be able to use this) Also, it is not a PTV unit, it doesn't pause/rewind live TV. which somehow I thought it did when ordering. It would be nice to be able to rewind a program and start recording, but since that is not why I bought the unit that is not a real biggie.

The disc tray and display look like mirrors until it lights up. Looked really cool coming out of the box. It's about 4 inches wider than my VCR but thinner.

I've saved about a dozen programs using the SP mode (appx 54 hours available on hard drive in SP mode) and watched a number of them. I'm able to leave my satellite on a channel and have the unit save a progam via timer when I'm gone. So far I've only burned 1 DVD and it played fine in my family's players and looked great. A neat feature is that you can fast forward it through a program and set chapers by clicking 1 button. If you do that before and after commercial breaks you can make a playlist without the commercials and the disc is burned without them. It's not as flexible for editing as PC software but for simple skipping over/joining segments I think it is going to be fine. I'll just record my home movie segments in the order I want to join them

The unit also will record straight onto DVD in modes that go from 2-8 hours on the disc depending on quality you want. I haven't done that yet, will try it soon. I can't tell from the manual if you have to record it all at once or not. Regardless the unit does all I wanted it for. You can see more photos and info here
(note: this is not the place I bought it from, I got it from an eBay power seller, this is just the first Google link that had extensive photos and info, I don't have any experience with them)

Overall so far, I give the unit
Fairly simple menus and plenty features for home use.

It uses DVD-R discs (and something called DVD-RAM which nobody around here has). It does not use DVD+R discs. I had to take some of those back DVD-R discs are about twice as expensive but about the same price as blank VHS (about $1.50, less depending on bulk) with the exact same available recording times. Flexible Recording lets the unit fill the disc up with the higest quality available recording speed Vs length of program/space available.

I have probably used my VCR to record TV for the last time