9 out of 9 people found this review helpful.
REOCCURRING BUGS...BUYER BEWARE !!!
Date of Review: May 7, 2007
The Bottom Line: Buyer Beware. Reoccurring bugs while transferring home video tapes to DVD.
I have purchased Panasonic electric consumer products for over 40 years...including an electric pencil sharpener, a back massager, personal radios, personal cassette recorders, cordless telephones, a dot-matrix printer, a dual-drive tape deck, 7 TV sets, 3 VCRs, etc....and had very impressed and pleased with Panasonic products. Two weeks ago, I purchased this DVD/VCR Combo Recorder model DMR-ES46VS and spent considerable time learning how to use it. It is loaded with features. However, my immediate objective was to transfer (convert) all of my Super 8 Video tapes to DVDs. During the process, I encountered 2 REOCCURRING operational BUGS in this recorder. While transferring my tapes, the machine produced the error message that "Copyrighted material could not be transferred..." and stopped recording. This occurred a couple of times on the same tape...the tape of a family event that I videod on my video camera! On several other tapes, the machine just arbitrarily stopped recording at several points for no apparent reason. I verified that I hadn't accidentally set the shut-off time limit. I had to locate where it stopped on the DVD (a very time consuming and frustrating process), rewind my tape and find the matching location (again, very time consuming and frustrating) and start recording from that spot. This process creates a new title on the DVD and breaks up the continuity of the recording. I was very frustrated with these 2 types of REOCCURRING operational BUGS and returned the machine. Bottom line...BUYER BEWARE !!!