Panasonic DIGA DMR-EH50 – DVD recorder / HDD recorder

I’m compelled to write this review partly because of the unfortunate experience the writer of “WHAT A POS…” had. My experience was a lot better – but it wasn’t all that easy.I decided to try this thing out knowing that other people had had trouble setting theirs up. I figured that if I couldn’t make it work, it would just go back to the store before it got the best of me. Evidently, the biggest problem is that the TV Guide thing doesn’t work with certain cable companies, and possibly not at all with satellites. We have analog cable (with no box) and I was able to get all the TV Guide stuff downloaded with no difficulty (although it did take some time.)So far so good – but learning to do just some basic stuff was a real hassle at first. I would say there’s three big problems: 1) the remote is really hard to work with (and you need to use the remote to use almost all the features), 2) you’re constantly going through all these different onscreen menus and panels that are really awkward and you can’t easily swap from one to the other and 3) the manual is hard to get information from. (Mostly, it’s in there, if you really go digging – but I’ve found little things that just aren’t correct at all.)But after almost five months, I think this machine and I are beginning to understand one another. And it just loaded with features – a lot of which I haven’t even tried yet. I’m amazed at all the features you get for three hundres bucks or so.Once it’s set up, the TV Guide constantly refreshes itself so you can see what’s on for the next eight days. You just pick your programs, click on them, and they get recorded. Then you can dub them onto read-only or read-write disks, or just watch them and delete them when your done. (It takes a little over ten minutes to dub a two-hour movie onto a disk, once you get things working.)Some people have been dissapointed by the editting capabilities and the fact that it doesn’t dub chapters, etc. onto disks. If these are important to, you this might not be your best choice. And if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like to tinker with gadgets, you’re probably better off leaving this one alone.