Panasonic DMR-ES15

[bpc]

I have never had a problem with the few Pansonic products I have purchased through the years-until now.

I recently purchased the Panasonic DMR-ES15 DVD recorder to replace my Philips DVDR985-nad was very disappointed. Recording directly from my sat dish via SVHS cable in the LP to EP mode produces a terrible picture. Picture is very soft, not sharp at all, and plenty of short vertical lines appear in the whole picture. I know EP mode is not great, but this picture was almost unwatchable-not nearly as good as the Philips unit. It was not due to any copy protection as SP mode was OK, and I was just recording normal network shows.

I returned the unit after a week-anybody else have this problem?

[gshelley61]

Not too many folks on this forum record in those mega-extended time lengths due to the poor image quality.

JVC DVD recorders have the best extended length image quality of any of the machines I've tried out, but like I said most of us stick with record times under 2.5 hours for a single layer DVD to maintain very good to excellent image quality. The one exception would be for VHS transfers... some units (like the JVC recorders) capture at half D1 (352x480) for recording times beyond 2.5 hours, so up to 4 hours on a single layer DVD looks perfectly fine if the source is VHS or standard 8mm videotape.

The ES15 has been getting good comments over at avsforum.com, but I don't think anyone has mentioned anything about the image quality for longer recording times yet.

[bpc]

I realize that longer recording times affect picture quality, but the unit I had was much worse than the older Philips unit. Sometimes looked as though it was a EP VHS recording put into storage for 10 years!

[ofbarea]

This is a limitation of Panasonic recordes... I have a DMR-ES10 and I have the same complain.