Panasonic DMR-EZ48VEBK - DVD Recorder & VCR Combination - With 1080P Up-Conversion & Freeview - Black

Hi, We'll try to make this as informative as pos and cover a fair bit of ground so it's a bit of a long read :-) Had this gem for 5 months now. Bought like most for transferring older technology to DVD "Ram" disks so if we need to we can delete them and re-use the disks. ( Gotta love re-usable media ) We have had no problems at all, started off copying our 20 year old 8 m/m video cam tapes using the "record what's on screen" feature via connected to our Panasonic TV. This feature is great as you can record whatever you can input to your TV screen from many sources, even games consoles, or pictures/images, stuff from mobiles etc Now ploughing thro' our VHS tapes using the VHS to DVD option ( you can also record the other way around ) and if anything the picture quality has improved a lot over the originals as if they have been filtered of a lot of fuzz ? Having said that don't expect miracles, you can't get a silk purse from a sow's ear LOL DVD recording options are great, with the ability to set recording time from 1 hour to 8 hours per disk depending on what quality content you need. We found setting it to long play ( 4 hr's ) we could record 2 x 2 hour sections per disk with very acceptable quality results. DVD edit facility has a shed load of options, such as splitting a long recording into chapters,adding titles and best of all a partial delete feature so you can edit out unwanted sections like advert breaks from Freeview recordings, blank tape sections at the end of a vhs film, or when they slap the news halfway through an evening film - Gr'rrr !!! and also the major benefit of saving recording space on the Ram DVD disks :-) Manual comes in at 96 pages ( all english ) which are needed to cover the mountain of options this machine can handle but it is well laid out and fairly intuitive. Remote handset is also well laid out and the text is READABLE :-) Also the AV button scrolls through about 8 inputs/outputs to easily select the recording options. Overall very pleased with our purchase, long term we'll have to see how it l asts with lots of use, Oh, and don't skimp on the connections cable quality, you view what you pay for :-) Maybe we got lucky, but seems some of the low score marks are down to poor reception/connections and cross product compatibility with older televisions. Owning a newish Panasonic television made this an obvious choice for us. Hope this helps, but there are plenty of independent reviews online elsewhere.

The combi VCR - DVD recorder arrived in very good condition and works very well. The picture quality from the upscale HDMI output is excellent. The seller kindly upgraded our order to a newer model for no extra charge which we greatly appreciated. It’s a great solution if you still want to use VHS tapes and display them on an HDTV.

I bought this expecting a high quality freeview dvd/vhs recorder. It seemed exactly what I wanted and I like Panasonic dvd products. It replaced my JVC vhs recorder/dvd player and a Pansonic DMRES freeview/dvdrecorder, both excellent. The new Panasonic box had very poor image quality, lacking details and with very washed out colours. I hope this box was defective and it does not represent the quality of Panasonic's new offering. Amazon's excellent customer service took it back. I would advise seeing one of these in action before buying.

This is one of the best VHS-DVD combos I have seen and good value for the money. It was bought with the intention of dubbing all the family VHS tapes that will otherwise be lost and it does that job beautifully and simply. The unit is connected, along with a DVD-HDD recorder, to a 37" Sony Bravia. I bought an additional HDMI lead as well as the standard SCART to get the added functionality and it proved to be a boon. As soon as it was powered up the DMR-EZ48VEBK automatically configured itself, setting up the clock, tuning and channel configurations. All I had to do was give some names to the channel inputs on the TV. One of the big attractions to this unit is that the VHS recorder will play back all my old US NTSC tapes. This is where the having both SCART and HDMI is important. Playing back DVD's automatically uses the HDMI input on the TV so you get the best possible picture. With NTSC it is necessary to switch to the SCART input. This is no fault of the unit but a reflection of the very different format requirements of playing NTSC. PAL tapes will play back through the HDMI or SCART inputs. I am surprised at those who have found this unit hard to use. It is a combo unit so of course there is a lot to it. Not only do you have two separate machines but also the integrated dubbing features, Freeview tuner and HDMI. That is a lot of punch in one box! Likewise the criticism of a lack of eject button on the remote. That seems pretty logical to me. If you are ejecting a tape or disc then you are presumably going to remove it so having the eject buttons on the machine is just common sense. I have only two concerns with the unit. Firstly the VHS head drive motor is rather too noisy. It produces an audible and irritating high pitched whine that can be very intrusive and is much louder than the machine that this is replacing. The second criticism is that the VHS recorder sometimes does not recognise a tape when inserted and then will not play. The tape then has to be ejected and reinserted. This problem may be partly related to the power saving function being enabled. In this mode the machine uses much less power in standby but does take some time to fully power up. I suspect that if a tape is inserted just slightly too early then the system may get a little confused. I am not terribly convinced by the upscaling feature available through the HDMI channel. This is a system that uses intelligent image analysis to create extra pixels to give greater sharpness to the images. This can improve some VHS images but can lead to annoying graininess and picture jitter. I prefer a softer look but that is just a personal preference. It may work better in conjunction with a Panasonic Viera TV.