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Soon after telling my wife I would get a DVD recorder when the prices became reasonable, I
saw the
Panasonic DMR-E30 was selling for under $600. After a little research I managed
to find one for around $525.
The E30 has fulfilled my expectations. I got the E30 to replace my VCR. I want to be able
to do three things.
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I want to handle the overflow from my Tivos. Meaning that if I start to get close to filling
a Tivo, rather then deleting programs I really want but haven't had a chance to watch, I dump
them to DVD. I this case I dump them to rewritable DVD-RAM. Using a double sided 9.4gb discs I
can get 12 hours of recording. Granted this is not the highest quality recording but for my
purposes the quality is just fine. It is at least VCR quality. I'm not that much a stickler
for video quality. Many of you would probably not use this quality level.
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Archive programs I want to keep. Here I record to write-once DVD-R. These discs I can play on
most any DVD player. Here I usually pick 4 hours worth of recording on a single sided 4.7gb disc.
So far this has worked fine. I have tested the discs on my DVD player and they seem to work fine.
I've given discs to other people and they have been able to play them.
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Copy previously recorded VCR tapes to write-once DVD-R. I have a ton of show & movies recorded
on VCR tapes. Some of these are not available anywhere and the programs have not been shown in awhile.
Here I usually record 4 hours on 4.7gb discs. The quality of these recordings is obviously
no better then the original. But atleast they are preserved in a better media then magnetic
tape.
With the E30 you can't do any real editing, so if that's what you want this is not the unit for
you. You can enter a chapter title for each recording. I've programmed my Pronto
to allow me to enter the titles just by pressing a single button. Otherwise you have to use the
numbers and arrows to navigate through a matrix of letter, numbers and special characters.
Anyway I really like being able to put programs to DVD. I'm looking at getting a DVD writer for my
computer to do editing and have a large back media.
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Panasonic DMR-E30