Home > Consumer Reviews > Panasonic DMR-EZ48VEBK - DVD Recorder & VCR Combination - With 1080P Up-Conversion & Freeview - Black

I bought this recently so have not seen its full potential.However,playing DVDs and old videos, produced very good results and in the old videos I saw lots of detail I had previously missed on my old sony VCR player.I watched Pan's Labyrinth on it recently, through my panasonic 37 inch plasma and I was amazed at the colour and depth ,it was at times almost 3D. Overall I am very pleased with it and I wanted a combi because I still have a big collection of VCRs, I've just not yet replaced with DVD.If I was paying for A DVD recorder only, at this price, I would however expect more.

Bought one of these machines a couple of weeks back and have been running it every day since. Purpose was to transfer tapes to disc, which it does, without fuss or bother. Straightforward to set up and operate, producing good copies. A nice bit of kit.

This machine is great for recording to and playing from hard disk, tapes or DVDs generally, but I bought it for my father (aged 92) to copy his large collection of holiday tapes to DVDs. Using the manual, we recorded the first two together and, since then, he has been going it alone without a problem. You put the tape and the newly formatted DVD into the machine and direct the machine to copy from Tape to DVD; the machine does the rest. Where more than one film is recorded on one tape, it even identifies them separately in the recorded index. For easy archiving of old tapes before they fade away, this is the way to go. Oh yes, and the quality of the recorded DVDs seems, if anything, better than the originals. Highly recommended.

Hi, We'll try to make this as informative as pos and cover a fair bit of ground
so it's a bit of a long read :-)

Had this gem for 5 months now. Bought like most for transferring older technology
to DVD "Ram" disks so if we need to we can delete them and re-use the disks.
( Gotta love re-usable media )
We have had no problems at all, started off copying our 20 year old 8 m/m
video cam tapes using the "record what's on screen" feature via connected
to our Panasonic TV.
This feature is great as you can record whatever you can input to your TV screen
from many sources, even games consoles, or pictures/images, stuff from mobiles etc
Now ploughing thro' our VHS tapes using the VHS to DVD option
( you can also record the other way around ) and if anything the picture quality
has improved a lot over the originals as if they have been filtered of a lot of fuzz ?
Having said that don't expect miracles,
you can't get a silk purse from a sow's ear LOL

DVD recording options are great, with the ability to set recording time from
1 hour to 8 hours per disk depending on what quality content you need.
We found setting it to long play ( 4 hr's ) we could record 2 x 2 hour sections
per disk with very acceptable quality results.
DVD edit facility has a shed load of options, such as splitting a long recording
into chapters,adding titles and best of all a partial delete feature so you can
edit out unwanted sections like advert breaks from Freeview recordings,
blank tape sections at the end of a vhs film, or when they slap the news halfway
through an evening film - Gr'rrr !!!
and also the major benefit of saving recording space on the Ram DVD disks :-)

Manual comes in at 96 pages ( all english ) which are needed to cover the
mountain of options this machine can handle but it is well laid out and fairly intuitive.
Remote handset is also well laid out and the text is READABLE :-)
Also the AV button scrolls through about 8 inputs/outputs to easily select the
recording options.
Overall very pleased with our purchase, long term we'll have to see how it l
asts with lots of use,
Oh, and don't skimp on the connections cable quality, you view what you pay for :-)

Maybe we got lucky, but seems some of the low score marks are down to poor
reception/connections and cross product compatibility with older televisions.
Owning a newish Panasonic television made this an obvious choice for us.
Hope this helps, but there are plenty of independent reviews online elsewhere.

This is one of the best VHS-DVD combos I have seen and good value for the money. It was bought with the intention of dubbing all the family VHS tapes that will otherwise be lost and it does that job beautifully and simply.

The unit is connected, along with a DVD-HDD recorder, to a 37" Sony Bravia. I bought an additional HDMI lead as well as the standard SCART to get the added functionality and it proved to be a boon. As soon as it was powered up the DMR-EZ48VEBK automatically configured itself, setting up the clock, tuning and channel configurations. All I had to do was give some names to the channel inputs on the TV.

One of the big attractions to this unit is that the VHS recorder will play back all my old US NTSC tapes. This is where the having both SCART and HDMI is important. Playing back DVD's automatically uses the HDMI input on the TV so you get the best possible picture. With NTSC it is necessary to switch to the SCART input. This is no fault of the unit but a reflection of the very different format requirements of playing NTSC. PAL tapes will play back through the HDMI or SCART inputs.

I am surprised at those who have found this unit hard to use. It is a combo unit so of course there is a lot to it. Not only do you have two separate machines but also the integrated dubbing features, Freeview tuner and HDMI. That is a lot of punch in one box! Likewise the criticism of a lack of eject button on the remote. That seems pretty logical to me. If you are ejecting a tape or disc then you are presumably going to remove it so having the eject buttons on the machine is just common sense.

I have only two concerns with the unit. Firstly the VHS head drive motor is rather too noisy. It produces an audible and irritating high pitched whine that can be very intrusive and is much louder than the machine that this is replacing.

The second criticism is that the VHS recorder sometimes does not recognise a tape when inserted and then will not play. The tape then has to be ejected and reinserted. This problem may be partly related to the power saving function being enabled. In this mode the machine uses much less power in standby but does take some time to fully power up. I suspect that if a tape is inserted just slightly too early then the system may get a little confused.

I am not terribly convinced by the upscaling feature available through the HDMI channel. This is a system that uses intelligent image analysis to create extra pixels to give greater sharpness to the images. This can improve some VHS images but can lead to annoying graininess and picture jitter. I prefer a softer look but that is just a personal preference. It may work better in conjunction with a Panasonic Viera TV.