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.

I had compared many reviews of DVD/VCR recoders before settling on this machine which was offered by Amazon at a very competitive price.

As has been stated in other reviews, the machine does take quite a long time to set itself up from switch on but after that setting up the recordings using the 'Guide' is excellent. I like the facility of being able to edit the recording times before actually switching the machine off to record the programme. This is especially useful when broadcasters do not send 'start' and 'stop' information to the programmes. In these instances, the start and ends of programmes can be missed off but this can be remidied by manually altering the times on the second set up page before finally placing the order to record.

Playback quality is excellent and being able to record programmes off Freeview is a real bonus as there are some interesting programmes there which I would otherwise miss out on seeing. Although I was a little hesitant before I bought this machine, so far I am very happy with it.