Panasonic’s VHS/DVD/HDD Recorder

PANASONIC’S VHS/DVD/HDD RECORDER REVIEW: This player/recorder does it all

October 2006 By Brian Ploskina

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With all the cheap DVD players flooding the market and all the hype about HD DVD and Blu-ray, it can be an uphill battle making the case to spend $500 on a regular old DVD player.

But then, the new Panasonic line of DVD recorders aren’t your run-of-the-mill entertainment devices. Inside the machine is a DVD player, TV tuner, VCR, memory card reader and 80 GB hard disk drive, allowing you to record from any source to any source at the touch of a single button.

With so many functions and so many abilities, it’s a good thing it comes with a quick start guide, allowing you to set up the TV Guide On Screen menu in just a few button presses from the remote control. Unfortunately, it takes about 24 hours for the player to download the entire guide.

But once it is updated, you can scroll through the TV menu on the DVD player as well as when using the cable or satellite control box. And you program the machine to record to the VCR, DVD or HDD by selecting the program you want to record.

Scrolling through content on the HDD or DVD is better than textual menus. Each clip recorded will play inside the menu when you hover over it.

For someone who doesn’t have a digital, high-definition television signal, the DVD Recorder up-converts the signal, improving the picture quality.

Which is a good thing because that allows you to record these sources at better quality than you were probably watching them before. Of course, if you can afford to pay $500 for a DVD player/recorder, you can probably afford to pay for satellite or digital cable, and maybe even a high-def display.

There are a lot of different reasons someone would need something like the Panasonic DVD Recorder. One of the more convenient functions is the ability to keep personal videos on the player. When you have family or friends over and want to show them videos from the kid’s ball game or ballet recital, or photos from your last vacation, there’s no need to retrieve media from the bookshelf. With 80 GB of hard disk space, you can keep most of that on the player.

And when you do need more space on the hard drive, you can offload the saved content onto DVD disks. Speaking of DVD, it’s time to throw away all of your VHS tapes, now that you can record them all to DVD and even customize the on screen menu for each movie or video right from the player, rather than having to use a software program like iMovie. The DVD player supports just about any format you’d need: DVD RAM, DVD RW/R, DVD Audio and DivX.

We did have some problems using the SD memory card reader. Every time we inserted one, the player said the card was unformatted. However, the same card worked in every other device we put it into.

Digital and analog connections to your television or receiver include HDMI, optical digital audio, component and S-video.

Panasonic also threw in an IR Blaster, a device that sits in front of your cable or satellite receiver, and changes the channel using the Panasonic Recorder’s remote.

If you’re looking for a dynamic living room entertainment experience, without going the route of Blu-ray or HD DVD just yet, then the $500 is well worth it for this player.