Originally posted by Desk
PANASONIC
Both the Panasonic recorders seem pretty good machines. The E50 seems pretty cheap, but while the HS2 comes with a hard-drive its highly expensive at £880. Crucially, however, neither machine supports a rewritable DVDR format.
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THe HS2 is only £799 at multigegionmagic in region 2 form, I paid an extra £30 to get the multiregion one.
Thr machine supports naked DVD-ram discs which may be better supported by new players in the future, but the whole point is being missed here.
Once you have the hard drive the need for rewritable media is gone, except where you wish to temporarily store programs off the hard drive. EG I wish to get the whole Dune mini series on sci-fy channel and am putting episodes 1 and 2 on a -ram disc so as not to waste write once media should I miss an episode and give up over the 3 week period of broadcast.
Once the required program is on the hard drive it can be edited as reqired to remove over-run, ads etc quickly and easily, and then burnt to DVD-r. The original is still on the hard drive so if the media fails or you want more copies the option is still available. The panasonic is superb here as it can adjust the quality to exactly fill the media.
I can't see the logic in the non hard drive machines of any make as editing is limited and even if you create the perfect edit on rewritable material, you still have to have another machine to play it back to get the neccesary permanent copy.
THerefore the pricing of the hs2 looks much more reasonable.
To get the equivalent with any other recorder requires an additional hard drive recorder such as a tivo or sky+ and not owning one I have no idea if the programs can be edited before recording to dvd or what the relative quality is. Or alternately a dvd player that can play back the rewritable material with the edited program on so that the recorder can produce the permanent copy. They are also very restricted with a maximum of 6 hours at poor quality on any of the machines without the hard drive.
Therefore alternatives are
1) E30 or phillips at approx £450 plus Sky+ at £300? plus £120 year. So for 5 year life of equipment = £1350. (Tivo costs would be similar, possibly £100 less) I accept that this gives an easy to use programme recorder and second tuner, but I have rarely needed this due to the huge number of repeats available.
2) E30 or phillips plus reasonable compatible dvd player say £700 total, slightly cheaper than the HS2 but only up to 2 hours at a time recording at decent quality.
THe DVD-R media is cheap at under £1 a go for reasonable quality, and I have not had a media failure yet, although I have not had the machine that long. I also understand that virtually every player made can play these back and as it is a core supported media this is unlikely to change in the future until DVD itself goes out of fashion.
What surprised me most was the usefullness of the hard drive and how much I just use the machine for time shifting. There are about 6 hours of programs to see on the drive at present with more to record to day to fill the more barren hours next week, with no inserting and removal of media and resorting to the 6 hour mode to fit things in before the next opportunity to replace or turn over the dvd-ram.
The ability to pause a current program or catch up with it or a recording already underway is the real killer in the panasonic system. This is so useful.