Panasonic DMR-ES10 DVD Recorder

Panasonic DVDR's are generally rather picky and idiosyncratic as to which brand of blank media one uses. This one is less so. There are still failures, but the ES10 will accept pretty much anything up to 16X.

The worst aspect of a Panasonic recorder is what they all do, regardless of generation, when a disc fails. Instead of just rejecting a disc, it shuts down, goes into recovery mode, and may take up to five minutes to resolve the issue internally, and allow you to eject failed disc. Sometimes you just have to unplug it, let it reset, and press eject to restart. It can be frustrating, after a 2hr recording, to have it fail and reject upon trying to finalize.

We have ten of these. When they work, they work great. Two have just shut down spontaneously - no power, nothing, they just go dead and you can't get them to power up again. There is no dealer servicing and Panasonic rips you off for $150.00 to fix these units no matter what's wrong with them so we just throw them away since they're only $60-$80 on Ebay or other resellers.

We had one of these units for the past 4 years. It has features the newer models offered by Panasonic don't, such as the capability to save phrases to use over and over.

After 4 years of use as both a burner and player, we only just started having issues with the old machine, so I looked here to buy one if I could.

This machine already had a few phrases saved in it, so it had been used, but gently.

I have successfully recorded 4 full length movies on one 4.7 gig DVD R disk and have had to use hd decoder to convert to normal format for viewing on computer. The movies played fine on my hd monitor at 480i and 480p settings. The picture quality is fine.
Downside , unit is picky about brands of dvd- rw disks that it recognizes. and doesn't record to DVDDL-rw or r disks. But getting 4 movies on one regular disk makes up for that by a long shot.