7 out of 7 people found this review helpful.
Great for basic VHS-to-DVD conversion
Date of Review: Jan 6, 2007
The Bottom Line: If you want a moderately priced standalone unit of decent quality to copy VHS tapes to DVD, I highly recommend this unit.
I have a bunch of family video VHS tapes recorded between 1988 and 1995 that I wanted to move to DVD before they deteriorated or before VHS recorders became impossible to find.
I decided to get a combined VHS/DVD recorder unit because I wanted to be able to do this without tying up either the family home entertainment center or the family computer, and without running cables between existing units. I just wanted to set up something in a corner with a secondary TV and get this specific project done. So I started surfing various forums looking for info about specific units for this purpose, and I found a number of queries from people like me who knew what they wanted, and just wanted some advice on hardware.
Unfortunately, most of the responses fell into one of the following categories:
- Why don't you do this on your computer with XYZ hardware and ABC software??
- Why don't you buy the FUBAR2000 Ultra DVD recorder and record directly from your current VCR player??
- Why don't you send this out to a professional copy service and have it done right??
So the point of my review is to address those people who know that they are looking for a basic, combined VHS-to-DVD deck for moderate cost and decent (not spectacular) quality, and who are not looking for helpful but misdirected advice about how other people think they should be tackling their project.
Summary: I received a Panasonic DMR-ES35V deck for Christmas. I set it up in a corner and spent a few days over my Christmas-to-New-Years vacation week copying all my old family VHS tapes to DVD. I'm done. I'm happy.
Updated details: The one-button copy feature of this unit is the primary selling point for me. For a user who wants total control over the copy operation, it might be a negative since it does not provide access to features such as recording speed/resolution or preset recording times, and does not permit chapter division. Basically you pop the source tape in the VHS slot and queue it up, put the destination disk in the DVD slot, then press the COPY button. You must manually monitor the copy operation and press STOP at appropriate spots, or the entire tape (or at least two hours of it) will fill up the entire DVD as one title, leaving no option to create a usable navigation menu.
Assuming that you do monitor the copy operation and stop it at logical points, you will be able to create a menu that is adequate for most users. This is another point where high-end consumers may grumble, but where I feel Panasonic made reasonable choices to keep costs down. The menu editing tools are okay, but nothing fancy. You can cursor around an on-line screen of characters, numbers, and symbols to create titles, and you can fast forward and reverse through the video to find an appropriate screen shot to use for a thumbnail.
Since writing the initial draft of this review, where I focused on transferring family videos to DVD, I have started going through the rest of my VHS collection and started copying things like old off-the-TV recordings of Mystery Science Theater 3000 to DVD. These projects actually go a little easier than the old Video Tape Recorder source material, because the segments are longer and more predictable. I can start a copy operation and set an external timer for 20 minutes or 1/2 hour or two hours or whatever, and go off and do something useful while the segment transfers. However, if you don't get back to the unit in time, it will just keep on taping past the material you want. Another feature that would have been nice to have is the capability to pause the recording to edit out commercials. You either leave the commercials in, or STOP and restart the copy operation, which causes a new title to be created on the DVD.
However, some of these issues which are limitations of the "One Touch Recording" mode can be addressed if you explore the more manual "GUI Recording" mode.
Perhaps the most useful aspect of GUI Recording mode is the Flexible Recording (FR) feature. This causes the deck to first scan your source tape, and then adjust recording speed and resolution to just fill the destination DVD. I'm using this to transfer 6-hour EP tapes from PBS Ken Burns documentaries. (One Touch mode would only allow me record two hours' worth per DVD.)
One hint is to prep the tape in advance by finding the breaks between different shows and inserting a few seconds of blank recording time so that the Panasonic deck will automatically create new chapter when recording the DVD.
Now I can kick off a 6-hour transfer job and walk away from it until it completes.
Again, if you are looking for a complete suite of editing tools that give you total control over DVD creation, this is not the deck for you. But if you want to wade through your VHS tape collection and dump their content to DVD so you can throw the tapes out, and don't want to spend a lot of money on equipment, you will probably be very happy with this unit.
Once I have completed my transfer projects, I am going to replace the 10 year old VCR on my home entertainment center with this unit. It has a bunch of features beyond copying that I haven't even checked out yet.
