Review on Panasonic DMR-E30S DVD Recorder with Progressive Scan by Jose Muenzen

my friend has this device i used it over the weekend and thats what i think. Pros: The recording quality is pretty good. There were no surprises. In this area I am satisfied. Getting the record, on the other hand, was the hard part. Cons: This is probably the most difficult consumer electronics device I have ever used. The interface was so unintuitive that it took a long time to play around to figure out what to do. Once I figured it out, the design seemed so silly to me that it felt like Panasonic put it on the market at the expense of a good user interface. Here's why: -The instructions are poorly written. It reads as smoothly as riding a bike over cobblestones. Check it out and you will understand what I mean. It's an ill-conceived hodgepodge of images, text, and icons. Even the simplest problem is difficult to decipher. Also, the Index (on the last page of the manual) doesn't even have a "Recording" section. It has ONE line called "Record Mode". Since this is a DVD RECORDER I believe there will be a 'Recording' section with several subsections like 'Record', 'Select recording quality' etc. Instead, "Recording Mode" is the only item on the list that has something to do with the entry, which seems to suggest going to a page that describes how to do something while the device is recording. The remote control is horribly designed. Navigating with the up, down, left, and right arrows is difficult because they are so far apart. Incidentally, this is an integral part of using almost any onscreen action, so I found myself constantly stretching my fingers in weird ways to accomplish even the simplest task. Also, there's a small 'door' on the remote that you have to slide down, revealing another set of buttons. Strangely, the open/close button is located under this flap, which is annoying since loading and ejecting DVDs is the central task of this device. (Insert DVD, burn, remove DVD, repeat). I would place the open/close button in the top left corner of the remote like most other remotes. But no, on a Panasonic set you first have to slide the door and then press a small button that's in a non-obvious area. The play, pause and stop buttons are unlabeled. The only hint as to what these keys can do is an indirect reference to a small drawing in the middle of the keys. The play icon is a small triangle pointing to the right, the pause icon is two thick vertical lines, and the stop icon is a square. At first glance, this "seems" fair enough, but I usually watch TV with the lights off, and at lower lighting levels the stop and pause button icons look the same. All three buttons are the same size. It would be helpful if Panasonic made such important buttons more visible. It struck me that either Panasonic thinks everyone who watches TV does it with the lights on, or they haven't thought that through. Read on and you might agree that Panasonic fell victim to the last of these options. There is a button called "F REC" that allows you to specify how much time to allocate for the remaining recording on the disc. Let's say you want to record at the lowest speed (worst quality) that will allow you to burn 6 hours to disc. This is the right place for recruitment. (By the way, this button is under a small "door" that needs to be moved down). Once installed, you can start recording from this screen. The screen has "Start" and "Cancel" buttons that can be accessed with the Up/Down/Left/Right buttons that are too far away. Here is the screenshot: Disc quality/time on the left: X hours Y minutes marks the start icon. Once it's highlighted, press Enter (the button on the remote that's too far apart in the middle of the Up/Down/Left/Right buttons) to begin. The problem is that if you press the "Down" button too far away, the device defaults you to the "Cancel" button on the screen, after that you have to press the "Left" button to go to "Start " to get. Zone. As it stands, the block always assumes you made the wrong choice, because no matter where you are, even if you hover your mouse cursor right over the start button, you can NEVER just press the down button, to navigate to your intended location. . You need to press the "Down" and then the "Left" button on the remote control. It's a real pain after a while. Panasonic apparently in its infinite wisdom decided to 'protect' users from accidental recording by default by hitting the 'Cancel' button every time they want to record. Ironically, if you accidentally recorded something you could just DELETE it, but Panasonic decided you had to explicitly 'confirm' your selection in some non-obvious way. The same happens when deleting a partition. By default, the device presses the Cancel button, regardless of where the cursor's starting point was. This is a bit more acceptable since deleting a program has more serious consequences than writing a program, but to add to the trauma, if you REALLY decide to delete a program, for a select few there is no *obvious* indication that what's up seconds. how long it takes to erase. The next point is perhaps the dumbest design flaw of all screen displays. Let's say you are recording a program and press the "Pause" button to stop the recording. The on-screen pause graphic appears in the top right corner of the screen and DISAPPEARS for about two seconds! So you get stopped and you will NEVER be able to realize this fact because there are no ads on the screen! I'd add that for 20 years, VCRs have had an on-screen indicator to show that recording has stopped. The indicator consists of two thick vertical lines that remain on the screen during the pause. That's perfectly obvious. Why Panasonic decided to remove ALL the icons from the screen when you pause a program is beyond me. In general, a very bad design, but the recording quality seems normal. Getting this good record was agony.