The nice thing also about DVD Recorders is that if you just happened to be scanning the channels & you see something you want to record you can just hit the record button & you never have to worry about recording over something because the recorder will automatically find the blank spaces on a disc to record on so no more Rewinding/Forwarding to find a spot to record on like a VCR. I find myself more & more watching TV through the recorder on my Panny E55 so if I get a phone call all I have to do push the record button & then answer the phone & after the phone call is over I can pick up where I answered the phone & the recorder keeps recording the rest of the program while I'm watching what it recorded before. As for DVD-RAM it does not have to be finalized to play on another DVD Player but the DVD Player must be able to play RAM Discs (Newer Panny's & only a few others will play them) DVD-R Discs MUST BE Finalized to play in other DVD Players. DVD-RAM discs can be erased & reused up to 100,000 times where the DVD-R's can only be recorded on Once but they can be erased on the Panny but any erasing you do on the DVD-R's you lose the time. Example: If you recorded 1 1/2 hours on a DVD-R at the 2 hour speed & you decided to erase a 1/2 hour program the 1 hour program would still be there but you would only have a 1/2 left of recording time on the disc because you do not get the time back that you erased. This info is based on just using the Panasonic for recording & etc & not using a computer for editing & etc. You can also think of them as a VCR with better Picture Quality & more usefull tricks but if you din't want to use any of the tricks you can use them Exactly like a VCR & they pretty much Hookup the same way that a VCR does & if you wanted to manually cut the commercials out it works the same way as a VCR does. On the Panny you press Pause before the commercial comes on & then you press pause again to start recording again when the program returns. Hope this helps you out & that I din't confuse you.
