First the negatives: Built in copy protection prevents one from, say, sticking in a Disney VHS tape and attempting to create a copy from that onto DVD. Also, dubbing wide screen aspect formatted videos dumbs them down to pan and scan, presumably to satisfy the movie industry. When you insert VHS tapes for one touch dubbing, you cannot "pause" the recorder. That functionality is not present unless you use the external inputs.

That being said, the image quality takes my breath away, and appears to improve videos that are substandard. I surmised and anticipated correctly that an effective workaround to copy protection could be to instead utilize the recorder's electronic component inputs, namely the three input RCA pin jacks that are standard (yellow for video with red and white for audio) on many stereo and video components. We have lots of Mr. Wizard episodes, Dr. Who stories and much educational material taped off broadcast TV years ago that should do nicely as they do not... Read more

The unit worked fine for me until I discovered that it won't play DVDs recorded on other devices. I tried DVDs recorded and properly finalized on both my IBM computer and my friend's Sony recorder. I used the proper media and tried several different brands, but all I got was "ERR". I took these same DVDs to a retail store and they played fine on every brand of player, except for the Panasonic recorders (DMR-ES20 and DMR-ES40).

This is a new model and it clearly has a hardware or software problem. I'd stay way from it if you plan to play anything recorded by any other device (like home movies from family members).

I purchased this unit after a little hesitation from the initial online reviews. I wanted the flexibility of transferring VHS tapes to DVD and my camcorder. I own a Toshiba TIVO DVD recorder unit (TX20) which is excellent but tedious for transfer of tapes.

In short this is very good DVD/VCR recorder unit except for some quirks. The VCR portion is like any other VCR. The DVD recording quality is excellent for XP (1 hour) and SP (2 hour) and better than most for the EP (4 hour) mode. EP on the Panasonic was as good as high quality (2 hour) mode on my Toshiba unit. Pixelation and image blurring is a problem with both for fast moving images in this mode when recording from TV sources. With VCR sources, image quality suffers in EP mode from old VCR tapes and is better with SP mode. I have not experienced DVD compatability problems. DVD's made with the ES40 play on my Toshiba player. DVD's I have made on my Toshiba and on my Dell using Nero 6 and a Plextor burner work fine on the... Read more