Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Don't tell my girlfriend, but I think I'm in love. I picked this unit up yesterday, so this is obviously a very preliminary review, and I'll update it later if my opinion changes, but this seems like a real winner. And at a list price of $200, a real steal also. After buying (and returning) one pile-of-junk DVD recorder, I did a fair amount of research and found many horror stories and much dissatisfaction ... except for the Panasonic DMR-E55 (and slightly different models), which almost everyone here and at videohelp.com loved. However, it did have some difficulties for my intended use, in particular that it only wrote to write-once discs and to DVD-RAM. Now DVD-RAM seemed slick as a greased weasel, allowing the DMR-E55 to do TIVO-like tricks such as starting to record a show while you're out, getting home midway through and then watching the beginning while it's still recording the end, but if you wanted to watch the resulting disc on a standard DVD player, or to use your computer to make copies or transfer to hard drive for editing, you were out of luck (or would have to buy a DVD-RAM supporting drive). Plus, forget archiving stuff on DVD-RAM, even for use on Panasonic machines, since they run $4+ per disc. Nevertheless, with a somewhat heavy heart and plenty of reservations, I decided the E55 was what I'd go for, the least-bad solution, so I hied me down to Best Buy thinking I'd probably come home with one. Alas, they only had a display unit left, with no box, no remote, etc. But the sales guy sort of offhandedly mentioned, "Well, we did get this new model in, there's a stack of them over there." We opened up a box, checked the manual to make sure it had all the nifty features of the E55, and in a kind of daze I walked out with one, all the qualms and the feeling of settling for something that might be a pain-in-the-neck gone. I spent yesterday afternoon and evening playing with it, and what can I say ... it just works, smoothly and efficiently. I obviously have tried only a portion of the features and possibilities [and of course can't say anything about long-term reliability], but this new machine gets around some of the difficulties with the old E55. It seems like Panasonic was actually listening to the complaints, and came up with solutions --- -- except for the not widely supported DVD-RAM, the E55 only recorded to DVD-R, and reportedly not to (most) 8X blanks either. The ES10 additionally records to -RW and +R/4X and +R/8X, all of which I tested (and the +R were cheap discs, Teon and WinData). The results play on my computer's DVD drive. Being able to use DVD-RW gets around the DVD-RAM incompatibility for now (I can record, say, a bunch of episodes of Frasier, then transfer to the computer to edit out the ads, and re-use the original disc), though I might install a DVD-RAM compatible drive eventually. [For some reason, DVD+RW discs are not supported for writing.] -- many people commented on the obtuse manual and difficult to use remote and menus. I can't compare directly, but having been driven to blinking distraction by one bad DVD recorder, I can say the ES10 was a delight to use -- it was easy to find what little I needed in the manual, and I could largely just wing it. I was making "flexible record" discs (where compression is chosen based on total program length to use the entire disc precisely) immediately. If you hit the wrong button by mistake, the unit does not begin to make grinding noises and/or go into never-never land; it's OK to try things to see what they do. And if you're stuck, the "magic" button that gets you out of certain menus or situations seems to be labelled Return. -- to fast forward/reverse, you had to use and hold the chapter skip buttons; there are now separate buttons. I have no substantive complaints so far, but here are some annoyances. That most are so trivial speaks volumes -- -- the open/close control is on the opposite end of the unit from the disc drawer; for some reason this is not intuitive to me. -- there is no on screen display of the record mode (XP, LP, etc, i.e. recording quality). Only the display on the unit itself, which can be hard to read across the room. -- the unit uses 8.5 watts even turned off; the manual notes this and says you might want to unplug it when not used for long periods. Why can't they just put in a genuine 'off' and a 'standby' if they feel it's needed? -- some of the remote buttons are too closely spaced for my stubby fingers, yet there is unused or underused real estate in the configuration. -- 'stop' and some other controls seem to leave the unit in a kind of intermediate state (though they do have the desired effect); to go to a 'neutral' or startup state, I have to hit stop again. (Maybe this is some feature I just haven't figured out yet. Or maybe it's somehow an example of ... -- the menus maybe go a bit too far trying to protect you against doing foolish things. You get asked twice, not just once, if you really want to format a disc, for instance. -- the 8-hour/disc mode really is substandard, worse than a 6 hour VHS tape; but the 4-hour mode should be acceptable for many uses. [There is a 6-hour mode, but apparently you have to select that instead of 8-hour in Setup and I haven't tried it yet.]