Panasonic DMR-ES46VS DVD/VCR Recorder Player
from: Panasonic
Average Rating: 
Sales Rank: 15282
Sales Rank: 15282
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Electronics : Panasonic DMR-ES46VS DVD/VCR Recorder Player |
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Rating:  - * Nice Machine ... Panasonic does it again. I have always had good luck with Panasonic products. I owned a Phillips DVD recorder that created vertical sound bars across the screen. They were very faint but also very anoying. Phillips tried to fix the problem but had no success. I purchased the Panasonic DMR-ES46VS because it had all of the features I was looking for and the price was very good for a unit with all of the features. I have used the unit for 9 months and I love it. The picture and sound quality are great. I use the HDMI output to take advantage of the up converting. I would recommend this unit to anyone. You will not be disappointed. Rating:  - * VCR & TUNER SUCK ... Received the refurbished Panasonic Model DMR-ES46VS from Jungle Discount promptly. Packaging was poor so case took a couple of dents. The VCR section of this unit will NOT play a tape made on any other machine. Oddball speeds and overall poor quality picture. Interference cannot be taken out by manual or automatic tracking. Closed captions are garbled. If you are thinking of using this unit to convert VHS tapes to DVD, PLEASE SAVE YOUR MONEY! Even brand new tapes recorded at SP jump all around. Tuner gives a very poor quality picture. The DVD section is very good. Manual covers a lot and is written at "power user" level. The unit has so many features that you will have to almost memorize the book because the most common usage is hidden. Poor writing and organization. Rating:  - * Worked fine until it failed ... Purchased this at Sam's. Used it for 13 months. Of course, at 13.5 months, the power supply fan stops working and it keeps shutting down. Spent a looong time on hold waiting for help from Panasonic. After they transferred me twice (= more hold time), I got someone on who faxed me a form to send in for repair. No offer to extend the warranty. They just made sure I knew I would pay for parts/labor. I will not buy future video equipment from Panasonic because of their phone support and failure rate. Rating: - * Questionable reliability ... This DMR-ES46V was my third and last Panasonic DVD player, though my first recorder. I have yet to find one that will last much more than a year, using the device perhaps twice a week. Perhaps a refurbished one for under $150 would be worthwhile. While the functions are good for the price, product life for Panasonic players leaves much to be desired, at least based on my experience. Rating:  - * It's not perfect, but a good machine while waiting for HD format wars to settle ... I purchased this machine refurbished from Panasonic for a total of $150, including shipping, making the imperfections quite tolerable. It does much more than my previous DVD recorder which was twice the price. I have a Sony Bravia LCD HDTV and the display from this machine is quite good. After setting up the format for my widescreen TV, it worked like a charm. I do not intend to use it as a tuner. I rent an HD DVR from Comcast for tuning. I really did not see much difference in the video quality on playback with commercial DVDs, but for my home recorded DVDs, the improvement is significant. VHS also will play through the HDMI cable, with some improvement too. These are formated for 4:3 aspect ratio and there really is no getting around it until you can get an input that supports high resolution 16:9 through component or HDMI interface. I was able to record from my OnDemand playlist through Comcast (something you cannot do on the rented DVR). As with other reviewers, I am puzzled by the lack of eject and open/close functions on the remote, which even the cheap sets have. However, this machine does have very easy to use buttons that are large and right next to each slot on the machine. My past machines had tiny buttons that looked like all the others for the eject and open/close functions, making the remote almost a necessity. You do have to get up and walk over to the machine to get your disk or videotape out anyway, so this was not a huge deal for me. However, it did have trouble recognizing some DVDs at first pass, and I had to open/close the tray a few times before it recognized there was a playable disc in the drawer. So, you may want to wait by the machine while it reads before you sit down to watch. The remote is fairly intuitive, particularly if you are used to DVD-R functions. A huge rave for me is in regard to the flexible recording option, allowing you to customize the recording time on the DVD to fill the DVD, regardless of the length of the recording. This way you have the best possible recording quality. This is quite similar to DVD recording on your PC. Finalizing is a snap and much quicker than my old Sansui recorder. |
