Panasonic DMR-EZ48V error code

[Vintagepc95]

Hi everyone, I'm new to the forum and couldn't work out where to post this question so I will post it here in hopes it finds someone who can help.

I have recently purchased a Panasonic DMR-EZ48V DVD/VHS recorder from an elderly lady who said that the unit was in working order.
I left it for a few days until today when I tried to start it up and I got the "Please Wait" flashing on the display.
It was in recovery mode after being switched off for a period of time and I had to wait for it to complete the process. After it has finished whatever its doing it shutdowns and when turning it back on I am greeted with "hello" on the display.
After a short while it flashes "HDMI" then U61 and a text box comes up on the screen saying something like the unit was recovered so please wait for standby mode then turn the unit back on. Once it is turned back on it again displays "HELLO" then "HDMI" then "U61" and the finally coming up with a number 6 and a small d.
It just keeps repeating this every time and it will not correctly start up!

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated

[abolibibelot]

Could be a defective capacitor (or two). See here and here. I've had a similar issue years ago with a Panasonic DMR-E95H, a DVD recorder unit (no VHS), which I successfully fixed by replacing a single component which had overheated. Don't remember the specifics, but apparently this series is prone to that kind of issue.

[october262]

Hi everyone, I'm new to the forum and couldn't work out where to post this question so I will post it here in hopes it finds someone who can help.

I have recently purchased a Panasonic DMR-EZ48V DVD/VHS recorder from an elderly lady who said that the unit was in working order.
I left it for a few days until today when I tried to start it up and I got the "Please Wait" flashing on the display.
It was in recovery mode after being switched off for a period of time and I had to wait for it to complete the process. After it has finished whatever its doing it shutdowns and when turning it back on I am greeted with "hello" on the display.
After a short while it flashes "HDMI" then U61 and a text box comes up on the screen saying something like the unit was recovered so please wait for standby mode then turn the unit back on. Once it is turned back on it again displays "HELLO" then "HDMI" then "U61" and the finally coming up with a number 6 and a small d.
It just keeps repeating this every time and it will not correctly start up!

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated

see this thread - https://club.myce.com/t/u61-error-with-panasonic-dvd-recorders-fixable/221125

[orsetto]

Panasonic sold many dvd recorder variations over several years, some with VHS and/or HDD in combo, some with analog tuners, some with digital ATSC tuners, and some tunerless. Most of these were good reliable units with the occasional exception of failed capacitors as abolibibelot mentioned above. The faulty capacitor issue plagued all mfrs during the 2003-2010 period, not just Panasonic: nearly everything electronic from Apple to Zenith was contaminated by these counterfeit Chinese knockoff parts (when you see vague news stories about IP theft, this is the most notorious example, in this case the victim being a reputable Japanese capacitor mfr).

But then you have outliers like the EZ-48v, infamous for being poor overall designs with multiple baked-in failure points. Panasonic stumbled really badly with its migration to ATSC tuners for the American recorder market: the 47v and 48v VHS combos were particularly failure prone due to complications of this digital tuner circuitry mixed in with other engineering issues. As a result, the 47v and 48v have a terrible reputation for reliability and usability. You cannot entirely trust outdated posts and articles about various error codes, because like most mfrs Panasonic made a hash of these codes as the years passed until they became almost meaningless on later models.

U61 flashing on a DMR-E50 does not mean the same thing as U61 showing on the DMR-EZ48v. On the former, it indicates a range of failures that might be reasonably repaired, on the 48v it usually means the unit is totally bricked and repair will not be possible without spending hundreds of dollars to replace entire sub-assemblies (there is only one tech left in USA with spare parts, his repair fees start at $225 + shipping round trip). You might be lucky and find you just have a simple capacitor fault if you have the recorder evaluated by a local repair shop, but the trend for the 48v model is catastrophic circuit board failures in the drive and mother boards.

The most knowledgeable Panasonic recorder enthusiast I've ever encountered went by the handle DigaDo, posting comprehensively on nearly all facets of most of the USA/Canada models over at AVSforum (also VH and MYCE). He's been MIA since 2015, but all his info is still searchable. In this example post, he emphasizes U61 is typically an unrecoverable error when it appears on the later models:

https://www.avsforum.com/threads/dmr-es46v-u61-error-self-check-failed-message.1395173...#post-21672580

EDIT: sorry, just noticed you are located in Australia, so your EZ-48v is unlikely to be the ATSC-tuner USA version. The PAL DVB-T version fared somewhat better in overall reliability ratings but still suffered the same underlying (non-tuner-related) design flaws. It might be more amenable to simple repairs than the USA/Canada version, most of which have become useless doorstops.

See https://www.productreview.com.au/listings/panasonic-dmr-ez48v

[TopJimmy]

Hello. In case this helps anyone, I had almost exactly the same problem. Same model, similar elderly lady. In my case the display shouted "PLEASE WAIT" for ages followed by "HELLO" (in the meantime the DVD drawer opened) and then nothing happened and the unit would not operate. Pressing the power button initiated the same cycle again. Having found this thread I opened her up (the unit not the elderly lady) and saw that several capacitors on the power board had blown. I replaced these with EXACT value matches and the unit is now fully operational. Overall cost a few pounds (GBP), If it had been much more I wouldn't have bothered and certainly not worth a service centre repair. If anyone is interested I ended up replacing 8 capacitors - C11251, C11401, C11751, C11377, C11711, 11370, C11708 and C11701