Panasonic DMR-EH50; any reviews/opinions? (1 Viewer)

[Steve...O]

The DVD Recorder that may get me to officially switch over is the upcoming Panasonic EH50 that has an attractive price ($449 MSRP) and supposedly can maintain near SP quality even in LP mode.

Has anyone seen any reviews or, better yet, managed to snag one of these machines early? Supposedly this is going into wide release in May but finding any B&M store that has any info about these is impossible.

Thanks!

Steve

 

[Brad Newton]

I too would be interested in reading about this unit, along with the Toshiba & Pioneer.

 

[Doug Brewster]

They are currently available at Best Buy- saw them Friday.

 

[Steve...O]

Thanks for the info. You're lucky; this might be a regional thing. I checked with 2 local BB in my area and neither had them nor did they have a date when they would. It sounds like a lot of people have been asking for them though.

Steve

 

[Tim Fennell]

Circuit City has them on their web site at $100 - $130 off depending when you check it. I have been using it for about 2 weeks now and I think it is a keeper.

The EPG works on my Comcast extended basic cable w/o Cable box and looks ahead about 2-3 days. The hard part is you hook it up and then wait overnight for the EPG to get filled in. The first week took about 4 days to get set then I was able to set any show for weekly or daily recording.

My one gripe is that in order to record my wife's 3 soaps I had to set it to record the middle one (all on ABC) and then set it to start 60 minutes early and 60 minutes late. This was to avoid cluttering up the index with 3 daily shows.

I spent about 2 hours cleaning up and sorting the EPG so that the hot channels are in the first page then the rest are sorted by cable channel #. The EPG finds all sorts of "dead" channels that you don't get and puts them into the EPG amongst all the good channels.

I had read about this and was prepared to spend a couple hours sorting the EPG. Once I got that done it seems to work quite well.

The quality of recording for SP is very nice. That gives me about 45 hours to play with. I find that many shows I just want to timeshift are fine recorded the next speed down (LP) which has 90 hours capacity. The edges are a bit blurry but not anywhere near as bad as a LP or SLP tape recording.

The commercial jump advances 60 seconds at a time. It seems that many shows have 3.5 minute breaks so you end up watching 30 seconds if you use commercial jump.

The machine queues up commands so sometimes it is slow to respond to the >> (It has 5 speeds 2x, 10x, 30x, 70x & 200x)
and you end up going beyond where you want to go because you end up hitting 30x when you really wanted 10x. As you get used to it that becomes less of a factor.

Tim

 

[Ernest]

I have owned an EH50 for over a month and am very happy with the recorder. I subscribe to DirecTV so I cannot use the TV Guide, but that is okay I didn't buy it for the guide feature. It is very easy to manually program the timer for future recordings.

I have recorded several movies from HDNet, TCM, FMC, etc., with excellent results. The recorder will speed burn a disc in less than 5 minutes and finalize in 1 minute. I have been using Sonic 8X inkjet printable DVD-R discs.

I bought the recorder from buydig.com for $343.