bit-tech Shopping: Panasonic DMR-ES15S DVD Recorder

Rating: 10

Time with product: 2 Months

Strengths: Nearly flawless design. Multtiple settings and options

Weaknesses: The owner's manual is massive.

Summary: I am very pleased. I cannot beleive the flexibility that Panasonic has built into this low end model. Consider me more than satisfied. It has given me more insight inot upgrades; some components are worthy of big bucks, and others are wise spartan purchases.

Rating: 10

Time with product: 1 Week

Strengths: Records on DVD-RAM (allows thousands of more overwrites than DVD-RWs), slim profile, best features in this price range, very good quality for a low-end unit.

Weaknesses: The remote doesn't open the tray (but who cares, you have to get up to put in/take out the disc anyway).

Summary: I Did My Research, and Panasonic Had It Panasonic makes several different levels of DVD recorders. The ES15 is considered entry-level, but it packs a whole host of features into its sleek silver shell. The ES20 and ES25, they seemed nice, but I'm just trying to steal royalties from Hollywood's best and brightest, not make photo DVDs and record as high-definition. Setup is a breeze, even for technophobes or people with tons and tons of electronic equipment. The manual shows some basic wiring diagrams, with most of the typical permutations (TV, VCR, and cable box or dish). If you have an older television, never fear, the Panasonic folk thought of you, too. Since Panasonic was nice enough to include the necessary RCA wiring and yet another coaxial cable to hook it into the round-robin cabling, I was up and running in ten minutes. Most of that time was spent figuring out how to keep the TV sound running through the stereo receiver, and had nothing to do with adding in the DVD recorder. I Wanna Record Something! The fun started once I went ahead and purchased some blank media. The DVD-RAM that was included is nice and all, but I figure that's only useful at this point for recording from live television; since the other DVD player doesn't read DVD-RAM, it's useful only in this machine. Anyhow, some of the basic recording functionality and my experience with the features: Quick Recording Start. Have an un-full disc in the unit? See something you like? Hit Record, it starts in one second. Coming from the land of videotape, this beats the tar out of recording from years gone by. For some reason, this is a setting; apparently the "increased power consumption" when the unit is off justifies making this feature an option. Turn it on; I doubt you'll destroy the environment so that you can Quick-Start. Record Formats. While the literature goes out of its way to tell you to use DVD-RAM for everything (they do include one), not all that many average DVD players already in existence can play DVD-RAM. Plus, the discs are more like $2 apiece. Normal everyday DVD±R are dirt cheap now in quantity, and are perfectly fine -- but you have to finalize the disc before you can use it elsewhere. The Panasonic ES15 can record onto these formats, dual-layer of the same (though not straight through seamlessly), and DVD-RW, and all formats are finalized into DVD-Video format discs, which I've yet to find a player that doesn't play (DVD+RW doesn't get finalized). The DMR-ES15 will accept single-layer media up to 16x recording speed at max throughput. That seems to be where the industry has improved to at the present time, so it's not going to bother me when the inevitable progress is made. Really, that 16x limitation might only affect finalization times. I'll cope. Recording Speeds. Fairly basic. You can record as if you'll be filling that single-layer disc with one, two, four, or eight hours of copyright-free programming. XP, SP, LP, EP. Whee! There's a special 6-hour EP recording speed which offers the same picture quality of EP 8-hour but with improved sound quality, also. Each layer of a dual-layer disc can record roughly the same amount per layer as the above, with that hiccup when the player has to shift between layers when recording. My take is that this is similar to the program change on an 8-track. You remember those, right? Only, it's going to be a hiccup as long as it takes to finalize layer one (anywhere from 3-7 minutes). So caveat emptor if you're trying to tape a movie at XP or SP and use both layers. Flexible Recording -- a button on the remote -- will take as input the length of the program and automagically choose the recording quality and change it when necessary to fill the (remaining space on the) disc at as fine a setting as possible. If you have, say, a 4:15 recording to put on a disc but don't want to resort to the lower-quality 6-hour format for the whole thing, flexible recording will record the first 3:50 or so at the better-quality LP setting and the remainder at EP in order to maximize the picture and sound quality. Naming. A neat little point-and-click interface allows each program you've recorded to have its own special name on the disc menu that the unit creates. It could be less clunky, but it serves its purpose. If for some reason you use some phrases a lot, you can save those in the recorder's memory. Experience Counts My first few recordings used the included DVD-RAM; the basics are the same on this format or regular DVD-R, my general choice. It really couldn't be easier. Press Record on the remote or front of the recorder, and the unit starts recording in the touted one second of warmup. A red record light goes on, visible from the couch fifteen feet away, a little window pops up in the screen corner, and the timer starts counting. Pauses are instantaneous and sharp. I guess I was used to the vagaries on videotape recording, as I was surprised that there's no sloppy, jarring picture problems at those points. Recording at real-time has posed no issues. The picture, at the best-quality settings, has no artifacts and the pixelation of gradients, such as a shot of the blue sky, is minimal - surely no worse than the original signal. Scheduling recordings is fairly simple, and works like with a VCR. The ES15 has a tuner built-in, so if you set the channel and start/end times, lookie there, you're recording to disc! If you set the unit up to be a tuner, of course. In my cable-box land, it's pointless for me to do that. Each time you hit STOP, that's a "title" to the non-DVD-RAM discs, and that cannot be altered. With the DVD-RAM, you can add chapters at will using one remote button push, and later merge the chapters back together if needed. Other formats will separate the DVD-R disc into five-minute chapter intervals per program - eight-minute on DVD+R. Picture Quality At the highest-quality setting, using the entire disc for an hour's worth of video and audio, the picture quality is as good as the television picture. Lines are not blurred, color doesn't wash out, and images are sharp overall. At the other end of the spectrum, the Extended Play (EP) eight-hour choice shows a picture quality of a bit lower-quality than a new videotape recording at its longest-play setting. The sound quality also suffers dramatically, but that can be somewhat alleviated by choosing the six-hour recording setting, which gives the same video quality but improved audio. The four-hour LP setting offers dramatic improvements in both audio and video quality, to the point where it's very acceptable for archival purposes and is my setting of choice. It's not really sporting to compare the recording quality to that of a videotape, but the same DVR-recorded show transferred to both videotape and LP-quality DVD isn't even a contest. Two-hour (SP) is very lovely, somewhat sharper than LP, and perfect for (ahem) pay-cable attractions. Flexible recording comes in handy for films somewhat longer than two hours without a discernible quality dropoff in the last few moments. The one-hour XP is a waste, unless you only have an hour's worth of data to put on the disc. The audio is superior to the other formats, but it isn't much of an improvement and I don't see any person complaining that the picture quality isn't up to snuff. Most pixelation of the recording, from my perspective, comes from the original digital-cable signal anyway, so using the XP setting is pretty useless. Finalize For Functionality With a recorder, naturally, I want to share the discs I make with other units. This requires finalizing the disc, which essentially varnishes all the pretty data you've added to the disc. The titles you add, the scene for the program selections, all of this is set in stone and a selector page is created for the next DVD-playing unit to choose from. After navigating all the "Are you sure?" screens and opting to add a disc title, progress is shown on the screen. A one-show, one-hour-long program in the best (XP) mode took about three minutes to finalize. An eight-hour, twenty-episode disc at the EP mode took five minutes. During this time, I liken the process to baking a souffle: I'm afraid to move, that any sudden motion will cause the process to fail and my hard work recording would all be for naught. No such problems so far, and hopefully that is unfounded worry. Once finished, any non-DVD-RAM or DVD+RW disk is in "DVD Video" format, which virtually all players can read. It's also region-free. If finalizing does fail, however, it's very likely from what I've read that the whole disc just bought it, and won't ever play. Boring DVD Playback and Remote Features The ES15 has the basics covered on the remote. Fast-forward and reverse come in five steps, 2x, 10x, 30x, 70x, and 200x (just three steps when using DVD+R media). There's a commercial skip button which skips a minute ahead. Or if you know exactly what time in the movie the hero gets the bejeezus knocked out of him, the Time Slip feature lets you enter the number of minutes to skip ahead. However, since the machine isn't optimized for playback, functions like Disc Menu for prerecorded discs are not obvious - in this case, it takes hitting the Function button, then scrolling past "top menu" to the secondary "disc menu".I'm just trying to just get back to check out special features on a disc, not trying to unlock all-region! (Apparently this is not easy to do on this machine - do a web search.) You can add your television to the remote fairly easily, but since I've got a cable box (which can't be added) like so many television addicts in this country, that feature is of limited value. My little Panasonic workhorse -- if I call it that, it won't break on me, right? -- is geared toward recordings, so strange features that seemingly only are incorporated into porn DVDs, like switch camera angle and zoom, are absent on this unit. At least the frame-advance appears to be in fine order. You said DVD-RAM was really expensive. Why would I want to use it ever? Here's the thing. DVD-RAM offers tons of neat tricks and features you can't use otherwise with the Panasonic DMR-ES15. - Slow fast-forward. Want to watch stuff at 1.3x normal speed, including sound? Has Panasonic got a feature for you. - Add Scenes wherever you like. DVD-R formats get scene markers every 5 minutes or so, DVD+R every 8, after finalizing only. A button push during playback adds them. - Merge programs. Make a mistake and hit Stop while recording a show, intending to Pause the commercials out? You can stitch those back together if using a DVD-RAM disc. - Minor edits. One of the best features available, you can remove commercials, for example, with simple key sequences, and the remainder will merge automatically. That by itself is immensely useful as a timesaver for me, as transferring old shows from DVR to disc requires that I babysit the process in order to remove the unwanted eight-plus minutes of commercials per half-hour. - SAP. If there's an SAP channel on the show you're recording, DVD-RAM will bring it along. Maybe you can finally record Telemundo in English! - Playback while recording. Only with the DVD-RAM can you record continuously while you start watching from the front-end. I do this with the DVR all the time, but that's fairly nifty if I'm planning to record to the recorder instead of the DVR (space issues, sometimes). What You Can't Do. You still can't copy copy-protected media. Sorry. If it's protected, you'll get garbage on your discs and you'll have wasted your time. That goes for Macrovision-encoded videotapes, too, which is probably most of your collection. While hooking a VCR into the Panasonic is simple using the front jacks, that's only to let you record junior's first steps onto a nice long-lasting media format. This unit will not read CD-ROMs. Don't go with a cheap model like this one if you want to watch everything you copied onto CDs when that recordable techonology swept the country nine years ago. Out-of region discs also won't play, and I can't find a hack online that will successfully remove the region without an interesting "chipped remote" product that probably doesn't do the trick anyway. Final Thoughts I've been playing around with the ES15 for several weeks now, and I couldn't be more pleased with a piece of electronic equipment. It doesn't do everything I hoped for, granted, but in terms of its primary reason for existing, recording to DVD, Panasonic has pleased me greatly. It exceeds my expectations in nearly every aspect, from ease of setup to recording quality, to the surfeit of features to make recordings more friendly and useful in the future. However, as a DVD player it's only so-so and not loaded with features. You might want to keep a full-featured DVD player around if you're that keen on bells and whistles for your movie-watching experiences.

Rating: 10

Time with product:

Strengths: Ease of recording/playback, video quality, DVD RAM

Weaknesses: Using remote for TV only allows toggling through channels

Summary: I wanted a Panasonic because of DVD RAM. With RAM the recorder acts like a hard drive. You can record while playing back the recording minutes later. You can record while playing back a program recorded days ago. Once recorded the different programs are shown as thumbnails on the TV screen and can be selected for playback, again while recording another program. The recorder also has a very nice feature for copying tapes called flexable recording. This lets you indicate the length of the program on the tape and the Panasonic will use the highest bit rate (video quality) possible - you don't have to settle for 2 hr. quality if your vacation tape only lasts 70 Min's. Overall video quality is great. The 8 hr. mode looks like 6 hr. VHS, The 1 and 2 hr. modes look great. 4 hr. modes looks impressive as well. Overall this is a great unit and I'm really impressed with it.

Rating: 10

Time with product: 5

Strengths: Accepts multi-format discs, Can be used like DVR, Slim Profile, Multiple inputs

Weaknesses: Remote control layout, No skip back button, No open/close button (on remote), Lag time when searching forward and back, Awkward features.

Summary: Even though I list several weaknesses, I am very pleased with this unit. The ability to use most any type of DVD media is great. Picture quality is much better than from my DVR. I can also record from my DVR (ReplayTV) unit to this unit with no problems. The discs play well in my Samsung DVD player. The only anoyances for me is the less than clever remote control layout with lack of some useful buttons, and the lack of an extra input on the back. Also, the on-screen menu text/background could use a little more contrast especially when using during the day. I chose this unit as an upgrade from VCR. I am happy I did.

Rating: 8

Time with product:

Strengths: good

Weaknesses: -

Summary: f you still use a VCR, this product is for you! Once you try it your old VCR is going to the closet for sure. We are new to the DVD-RAM media but overly impressed with what we have seen so far. It is like having a 4.7 GB HD in the unit! We were also thinking about Tivo but this unit fulfills our needs. You can schedule recordings and delete them once you have watched them. The picture quality is very good in the 4-hr mode which is the maximum we would recommend. Longer modes do suffer from visible degradations in the image. The remote is very easy to use and it has a CM skip button which skips 1 minute instantaneously when pressed during playback of recorded shows. Press it three/four times in a row real fast and you can avoid commercials all together. And another cool feature with the DVD-RAM format is that you can record one show and watch another show from the disc at the same time! That is very cool indeed! No other media offers that feature.