$200 DVD Player/Recorder

DVD player/recorder? Look What $200 Can Buy You.
By Kevin Hunt Tribune Newspapers
The Hartford Courant Published July 31, 2005
Two years ago, a DVD recorder that did everything a VCR did, only in digital, cost $800. You may now congratulate yourself for fighting the temptation to buy one -- these machines now cost less than $200. So it'll take considerable more restraint to pass up Panasonic's DMR-ES10 ($199.95), among the first sub-$200, major-brand DVD recorders. After discounts, the DMR-ES10 costs little more than the combined price of a new DVD player and VCR. It plays movies like a DVD player and records your favorite TV shows like a VCR, only in digital. It also transfers all your old videotapes to handy, compact DVD discs. The DMR-ES10 is a no-frills deck built for DVD playback and television recording. It makes some concessions to price -- it omits a FireWire connection for owners of digital video cameras to make digital copies of home movies -- but preserves the superb recording quality of Panasonic's more expensive decks. "On low-end units," says Tony Jasionowski, group manager of strategic planning and development for Panasonic, "you generally don't find a DV [digital video] connector. You have to go to the step-up units. As prices come down, you'll get more features for the money."

Versatile player

The DMR-ES10 accepts every recordable DVD format except DVD+RW. (The "RW" formats are rewritable, so they can be used over and over, like a videotape. The "R" formats, like DVD+R, can be recorded only once.) The DMR-ES10 is at its best with a DVD-RAM disc, the only format that allows editing tricks like adding video playlists so home-movie segments can be played back in any order you want or playing back a show, TiVo-style, before it has finished recording. Best of all, you can remove commercials from a TV recording, then reuse the freed space. Unfortunately, a DVD-RAM disc won't play on most DVD players. If you're going to share a recording or play the disc on another DVD player in the house, make sure you're using an appropriate disc. (I used DVD-RW discs, for instance, so they would play on my Sony DVD player.) One look at the DMR-ES10's contoured front panel and you'll know this isn't an everyday DVD player. It has five recording-time modes, from one hour to eight hours per disc, and a useful Flexible Recording Mode that automatically determines the best recording quality for the remaining disc space. A 90-minute, made-for-TV movie is too long for premium-quality, one-hour mode. Recording it in two-hour mode will leave 30 minutes of free space. The Flexible Recording feature fills the entire disc with the best-possible picture quality. The DMR-ES10 makes excellent recordings, with its four-hour mode barely distinguishable from top-quality one-hour mode. I used an S-video connection to record directly from a digital cable box, then exposed the finished disc to the scrutiny of Dell's W4200HD, a 42-inch plasma. It made a flawless copy of a "Legends of Jazz" PBS special. In four-hour mode, I could not tell the difference between the original and a copy of Ken Burns' "Unforgivable Blackness" documentary on boxer Jack Johnson.

Annoying traits

Only in eight-hour mode did the DMR-ES10 show some annoying artifacts, such as during an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" ("The Shrimp Incident") when Julia Louis-Dreyfus' sweater suddenly turned red and Larry David's hair shifted in and out of focus. Even then, the DMR-ES10 was no worse than a VCR. And, like a VCR, it can schedule recordings and can even accept automatic recordings with the dated VCR Plus+ system. Because it does not work with either a cable box or satellite receiver, VCR Plus+ is becoming a technological footnote, just like the VCR. Of course, the DMR-ES10 plays CDs and all your DVD movies. It also plays DVD-Audio discs, a high-definition audio format that can include supplemental material like music video, photo galleries, lyrics and biographical information. For an entry-level machine, there's not much the DMR-ES10 can't do. "A lot people have DVD players," Jasionowski says. "But people still need to understand you can record." I did miss seeing recordings divided by chapters (as some recorders do automatically) when I called up the menu. If you want to skip to a specific scene in a movie, you're reduced to searching in fast-forward mode. The DMR-ES10, despite a confusing manual, isn't difficult to operate. With its versatility, picture quality and price, this DVD recorder is hard to resist.

I have to get one of these.