Need a Little Info on the Pana E30

[Ritter]

Hi,
I am in the market for my first stand alone dvd recorder and after reading this board and the user comments on this site I have a few basic questions.

First, I am most likely to buy the Pana E30 soley on price. But thats why I am here to see if what you guys tell me changes my mind.

Questions:
1. I have been reading several posts and comments on the e30 and other models and it seems that there are a lot of bad units. I hear a lot of complaints about the unit shutting down at certain points or after 3 months of good use the drive goes bad? If I made the plunge and bought a unit for 6 or 700 would the quality of the unit improve greatly? I was hoping someone could shed some light on this observation.

2: I was also curious if it could do what I am buying it for. Basically, the main functions I am going to do with it are: make dvd-r's of homemade vhs tapes and make dvd-r copies of some dvd-r's in my friends collection of tv shows. It apears that I should be able to copy homemade vhs tapes, correct? But can I also make copies of dvd-r's? Would I play the dvd-r with the shows in my toshiba and put in a blank in the e30 and copy? Also for what I would be doing would dvd-r or dvd+r be better, from what I was reading it looks to me that dvd-r is better am I right? So if you can give me more info on this topic I would appreciate it.

3. Final question. I was reading that the e30 can't do chapters. I was hoping that someone with a e30 could tell me exactly how the chapter situation works. I know someone said that it automatically puts in a chapter every 5 minutes. Someone also said that he was doing some tv shows and that since it couldn't do chapters all he did was stop it after every show and put in a new title. Since one of the main functions I am going to be using this for is tv shows and obviously I would want to split the shows up by chapter for easy viewing I was wondering how this works, could I split them up by episode, would what that one guy said by just stopping the recording and making a new title be what I have to do. If so how does that work? Basically I just want to know what the process is, and how it handles chapters in a little more detail. Thanks

Well, thanks to anyone who actually read all that and is writing me some answers.

Ritter

[rw2516]

I got my Pan E30 last November and have made over a thousand dvd-rs with no problems. Still working like new. I have only ever used Fuji and Verbatim blanks. I play everthing back in one of my Sony players and they look as good as the original. They say it records the picture brighter than the original, but both my tv and players are set to cinema mode which darkens the picture, and I have never noticed. You can record from cable, satellite, vhs, dvd, dvd-r, just like a vcr. You won't be able to copy anything copy protected without some kind of device to defeat it. You can't make chapters, the recorder gives the recording automatic chapters at approximately ever 5 minutes. I also do tv shows. My Sony players have a 6 disc memory for resume play, so I can watch one episode , stick disc in again whenever and will automatically play from beginning of second episode. I have also just stopped recording after each episode to seperate them as different titles. If the tv shows have commercials, I watch while recording, using pause to edit them out just like we use to do on vhs. Since I'm sitting there at the time I hit stop to seperate the episodes. I don't watch these in another player because I just watched them while recording. I just keep the original tape until I feel like seeing them again to make sure the recording is ok. It has it's limits but I'm enjoying the heck out of it. Basically just a dvd version of a vcr.

[ejai]

I own an E-30 and E-50, and yes the E30 does have a brightness problem, it makes the video look washed out. Rw2516 has a good workaround and that is to darken the TV screen to compensate for the lost of darkness and color saturation.

If I were you I would get an E50 or higher to get the correct color and brightness balance. If none of these things are important to you then the E30 is a great buy.