PANASONIC DMR E55EBS REVIEW

This DVD recorder only has one drawback and that is that there is no position memory for saving the exact spot where you are up to on a studio pre-recorded DVD or a DVD-R, and that's it, the only negative that can be said about it, everything else is excellent.

Firstly I must address some of the things in the review of the 19th of Jan 2005 that simply aren't true and could mislead amazon readers, you don't have to manually skip through the entirity of any DVD-R disk to find what you want, the machine puts auto chapters onto a finalised DVD-R every 5 minutes, so you can find your place just the same as any studio DVD by using the chapter button, the unit also has a thumbnail chapter menu so you can see mini screens of every chapter. The picture quality of DVD's is excellent, not poor, use a good brand of disk and you will get an excellent picture. RAM isn't expensive it costs £1 per disk and lasts up to 100,000 recordings which is more than you could ever do in your lifetime if you buy several of them.

FAN NOISE: The unit is the quietest model you can get, the panasonic's fan will only come on when the unit needs cooling every so often, often it can be 15 mins on a pre recorded DVD before it even kicks in, and then it is reasonably quiet.

SIZE: The unit is very compact, about the size of a VCR unit, where other makes are a good 30% bigger at the moment, which may prove inconvenient for many users to fit into their setup.

PICTURE QUALITY: Excellent, you will never be able to go back to Video though after using a DVD recorder, it will just look too blurry and horrible.

MODULATION AND LACK OF SCART SOCKETS: The only brand on the DVD Recorder market that cater for people who suffer from modulation interference (the wavy clear lines you get across the tv screen when using videos and DVD recorders) and for people with tv's without a scart socket, the recorder allows you to set a video channel frequency on your tv for your playback and that clears those annoying lines, and also lets you set output to your tv with a regular aerial output same as a VCR uses, so that you can watch DVD's on a non scart tv, this also gets round being able to watch macrovision protected DVD's if you were going to plug the DVD Recorder into the VCR to get round not having a scart socket, the macrovision would kick in if you did it that way and your DVD's wouldnt play properly.

MEMORY POSITION: Earlier I stated you couldnt memorise where you were up to on a disk, well that's only with studio DVD, with RAM Disks which is what this unit uses you can press the create chapter button and it records a memory position (chapter)so that you can find exactly where you marked it if you switch the machine off and come back later, this is similar to the index positions that VCR's use.

RELIABILITY: Excellent, disks have always recorded perfectly, and the unit works trouble free, if your inclined to handle disks badly and tend to get greasy fingerprints, dust or scratches on them then you could get problems,although I've never experienced any myself, but then you can buy disks in cartridges for this model that protect the disk with a casing, this protects them from such problems and you can be sure your disks will always record perfectly.

TIMESLIP: Never suffer another advert break again, currently all ad breaks on UK terrestrial tv last exactly 4 minutes, with time slip you press time slip button to go ahead by 4 mins and it instantly moves to 4 minutes ahead, hey presto your exactly at the start of the the recommencing programme, of course you can use timeslip for finding and moving to any part of a disk instantly too, timeslip does not work on studio dvd's, you just use their chapters for that.

CHASING PLAYBACK: Ram disks allow you to watch a recording, while it's still recording, this is the big advantage over videos where you had to wait for them to finish to watch the recording.

EDITING AND PARTIAL DELETION: If you want to make professional recordings from the tv, you can cut out the ads, get the show to start on the very first frame and end on the last frame by using partial deletion, this enables you to cut out any part wherever you like, you can use slow mo and pause to get it just right, also disks can be named and protected with a lock so that they can't be accidentally recorded over, this is also very simple, quick and easy to do, it's even fun!, if you have another DVD player that uses RAM, and you'd like to make a slick professional permanent copy, you can then play the edited RAM disk on it and record it on your recorder onto a DVD-R for a permanent copy that fits the DVD standard that will work on any machine in the world.

RECORDING TIMES: The unit can record at XP 1 hour, SP 2 hours, LP 4 hours and EP 6 or 8 hours depending on which settting you choose for EP, it also has a FR setting that will fit any recording onto whats left on the disk, for example if you wanted to fit a film of 1hr 40 mins onto the disk, choosing FR would fit it on perfectly and give you better picture quality that SP 2 hr setting would.

XP and SP look identical to the original broadcast quality, I would say once you get to about 5-6 hours in the EP mode it looks like video quality, even 4 hours looks far superior to video.

DISK FORMATS: The player also plays DVD Audio disks, which is still a rarity these days, along with the usual CD's etc.

PROGRESSIVE SCAN: Unit plays on LCD and Plasma tv's but not regular CRT's.

1.3 SPEED: You can speed up playback if your short on time and watch your disk at a slightly faster rate.

CONCLUSION?
Buy a Panasonic, you won't regret it, it's great value for money and it'll serve you well.