Rating: 
Summary: A Must Buy!!
Review: After reading all the reviews online for the Panasonic DMR E80, I decided to order one. And, it was WELL worth it.If you are trying to decide between the stand-alone Recorder and one of the Panasonic's with a hard drive, without question, go with the hard drive. This wasn't the main reason for my buying it, but it has turned out to be the most used part of the machine. With it, you can tape something off of TV, edit out the commercials and then burn it to DVD. Or, if you end up not wanting to save it, just delete it from the hard drive and you haven't wasted a DVD. As far as quality goes, XP is excellent quality, but using it, you can only burn 1 hour to a DVD. The SP mode, 2 hours a DVD, is very good, superior to VHS although you occasionally see some digital blocking in darker scenes. While the 4 and 6 hour modes do suffer from poor quality, they are still highly watchable and good for taping things that aren't all that important or things you know you are going to tape over. The only problem I have had is with compatibility. I have 2 older DVD players, one 5 years old and one (a no name brand) 6 months old. The DVD-R's I burned would not play on either (the newer one struggled and eventually played a couple). However they did play on my PlayStation 2 and another player I tried that was bought a few weeks ago. Most future players won't have a problem with them. It is very easy to use. The remote is simple and easy to figure out. I've been taping with VHS for over 20 years now. With this new machine, I don't see much need for VHS any longer. It is a great machine and I highly recommend purchasing it.
Rating: 
Summary: Strange problems "Error has occurred"
Review: I've had this unit for about a week and it's giving me very strange problems. I'd like to know if I have a defective one, but regardless I'm posting to represent these problems to anyone else who experiences them. It started when I came home expecting to find recorded video on the HD, instead there was a message, "Reformat HD?". (I never asked it to do this; it was spontaneous.) I couldn't select NO, because the machine was frozen. I pulled the plug & restarted it. This resulted in a series of other peculiar events: the display read "RECOVER" and after a while I got the message "ERROR HAS OCCURRED" and at one point I even saw a "CHECK DISK" error. I suspected it might be the DVD I had previously recorded on, but I took it out and the problems persisted. The problems have continued. Typically it will say "Error has occurred" and say "Bye!" then restart with the "RECOVER" status message. For a while I couldn't get it to come on, and I thought I wouldn't get to see my recorded programs. Now it's unwilling to record to DVD-R's; it gives up and says "Error has occurred", wasting discs. This is extremely disruptive behavior for something I thought would be like a VCR. My VCR never does anything this annoying. Panasonic, what's wrong? Why not get it right? If mine is defective, why can't it self-diagnose? Be careful. Don't trust this thing with anything important. Good luck.
Rating:
Summary: Panasonic DMR-E80H
Review: Good bye VCR, The entire set-up was very easy. Very user friendly. Highly recommend this item because of the HDD feature.
Use Panasonic web site, very helpful.
Rating:
Summary: Best of both worlds
Review: Hi! I have the best of both worlds. I have a DirecTivo combo receiver/PVR with satellite feeds and a DMR-E80H. First of all, the DirecTivo combination is INCREDIBLE as far as functionality. What's cool is supplementing it with the Panasonic. The DirecTivo actually stores the satellite signal so playback is pristine with digital AC-3 sound! Hence, that first copy is not degraded at all. I then feed the signal into my E80H so I can either us the hard drive as overflow for the drive on my TIVO, or burn either live or saved video from the DirecTivo to DVD. Quality is EXTREMELY good. It's great being able to "tape" all 24 episode of 24 in 5.1 surround sound, watch them once in full surround sound glory at my convenience, then back all of the episodes to DVD! I never watch live TV anymore because it is so much more time efficient to watch later and FF through commercials, blabbering sports announcers, etc. More over, DVD-R's can be bought for about a buch each and the finalizing method used yields DVDs that are much more compatible than those burned on my PC. Highly recommended (especially combined with a DirecTivo which can be purchase for as low as $100 if you look hard enough). Cheers!
Rating:
Summary: Love it!!
Review: I got this from Circuit City to try it out, and I fell in love with it the same day. This is what I've been waiting for.
Now that I know I like it and want to keep it. I am returning this at Circuit City and buy one from Amazon where it is about $200 cheaper. :-)
Rating: 
Summary: Glad I bought it
Review: For me, not having to search around for empty VCR tapes is just wonderful.
Maybe this is only my problem, but I just can't figure out how to record cable TV programs with timer. When I am away from home, I can only record programs from one channel...
Also, it took me three weeks to connect the cable box, TV and the recorder properly because the cable technician refused with the phrase "That's too much technology for me"!!
Otherwise, It's working fine and I am glad I bought it!
Rating:
Summary: Very happy with my Panasonic E80H
Review: My goal in buying this machine was to make DVD copies of all my precious family S-VHS family videos from as far back as 1934. I have them edited, titled, and with dubbed music backgrounds. I simply copy (by S-video cables)from my Sony DVD player directly to the Panasonic DVD recorder. I have thus copied over about 50 such DVD's,without a hitch. Results are perfect! The DVD's used were DVD-R (Panasonic--not too easy to find in stores--Maxell, and FujiFilm DVD-R) All worked perfectly. I am very happy with the Panasonic recorder!
Rating:
Summary: THE VERY BEST RECORDER EVER...FOR 3 DAYS
Review: I just loved the versitility of this machine. I have several of the Panasonic electronics, and this one fit right in. On the 3rd day of use, caput!!! The hard drive must have crashed, I believe, from what the screen was telling me. It quit, taking three episodes of Seinfeld with it. I was going to burn these to DVD and, hopefull, be able to view them on my Panasonic portable DVD player. Next!
Rating:
Summary: disappointed
Review: Everything is great except the ability of us and the set to record and then play it back on another DVD player. How do we do this? It should be with a button or two. This IS the hi-tech. age. The set should do it automatically. When we purchased it, another reviewer had commented that to make the DVD's compatible with another player, "just turn on the 'compatible mode' when recording, if you want to play it on another player." Well we can't find that. And it DOES tell us that it is "finalizing" when we finish recording. But so far we are unable to do what needs to be done to play the finished DVD on our Sony DVD player since the DVD recorder is a panasonic. This is disappointing to us novices.
Rating: 
Summary: Nice DVD recorder--with reservations
Review: I agree with most of the opinions given in other reviews, but want to add three things: 1) a dirty little secret of the Panasonic DVD recorders with hard disks is that when you transfer a recorded program from the hard disk to a DVD-R (a common practice--you get to remove commercials, etc.), the transfer is NOT digital. It is analog. The signal is converted to analog and back to digital again, then onto the DVD-R. Whether this is done to appease the powers that be to prevent pristine copies, I don't know. Reviewers on other sites have mentioned the loss of quality from transferring from hard disk to DVD, and it must be because of this analog-digital conversion. Don't get me wrong--the resulting picture is not awful, but it does not have that digital clarity that you might expect. By the way--the Panasonic models that include DV (FireWire) input DO transfer the video digitally from the camera to the DVD recorder--and you can see the difference. 2) I would give anything to have a computer keyboard input on this recorder. You can title the disks and the individual cuts, but having to spell out the titles using the remote by tabbing around on an onscreen virtual keyboard is only for those people with LOTS of time on their hands. Give me even a PDA type keyboard--anything! 3) The Panasonic manuals are just horrible. Expect to spend most of your time trying to decypher the manual. They mix up DVD-ROM and DVD-R capabilites on the same page (they are very different in the features they support), and it can be confusing at best. A key piece of information can be buried in a footnote. When I first got the unit, I took notes on the procedures and made them into step 1-2-3 lists! All that said, I do like the recorder, but I hope future models will be easier to use and have more capabilities. You can count on the fact that these devices will go down, down down in price.
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