Dvd Recorder Atsc

DVD Recorders -Panasonic DMR-EZ17K DVD Recorder with ATSC Tuner ...

I’ve been using my new DMR-EZ17K for around a week now. As expected for the price, it’s got some features that are great, and some that are not. Here are the unexpectedly positive highlights:

(1) The ATSC tuner picks up perfect widescreen digital over-the-air channels, under conditions where an analog NTSC tuner can receive mostly only static and snow. This feature alone – even without the DVD recorder – nearly justifies the cost of this unit.

(2) The quality of the recorded image in LP mode (4 hours) is truly exceptional – it’s nearly indistinguishable from the original 480p off-air HD digital signal. Kudos to Panasonic for this one.

(3) Using 480p outputs, and playing a downsampled off-air digital HD widescreen recording (EDTV), the recorded image quality nearly equals that of a 780p digitally-upsampled standard (non-HD) DVD. From 8 feet away on a non-huge screen, the image looks nearly as good as a true HD broadcast.

(4) Plays and/or displays JPEGs and MP3s burned to CD (but not DVD).

(5) With a certain amount of fiddling, and the use of the proper recordable medium (DVD-RAM), you can achieve chase-playback and “pause live TV” capabilities. While not nearly as convenient or seamless as a TiVo, it *can* be done with this recorder.

(6) With the use of the proper recordable medium (DVD-RAM), you can record one TV program while watching another (or the same) recorded program. Combine that with the 60-second commercial-skip button, and you might just never have to watch another commercial again. Nice!

Negative highlights:

(1) Panasonic seems to have maliciously omitted certain ‘free’ features merely for marketing parity or to cost-justify the other products in its lineup. Examples include an HDMI output connector and digital upsampling – features found even on Chinese DVD players.

(2) Even though this unit includes an ATSC tuner, which picks up high-definition terrestrial signals by default, Panasonic has chosen to disallow the received high-definition signals from being passed through to a connected HD monitor. Live signal video quality is needlessly reduced/downsampled to 480p, which is standard definition (but digital) EDTV.

(3) It literally takes 10 seconds to change digital channels.

(4) The ability to record the free, on-air Dolby-Digtal 5.1 signal broadcast with certain HD programming seems intentionally crippled, perhaps for anti-piracy reasons. This recorder down-samples the 6 digital channels to only 2 (ordinary stereo) when recording. So you can never record off-air Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. You can, however, play it back when viewing commercial DVDs, using the built-in optical output (no cable included, of course).

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