On 9 Jun 2003 11:54:54 -0700, dansisler@yahoo.com (Dan Sisler) wrote:

>Any users out there with this unit?

>pros? cons?

>gotta love the 40GB hard drive feature.

>but for $900 dont want to dive into a unit that could be obsolete in a

>year or so, take only the expensive DVDrs, etc etc...

Cheaper, if you use a PC, is a CenDyne "5" with

MyDVD - the price is around $170, the software

can do real-time encoding if you don't mind the

quality loss (or high-quality non-real-time encoding

from MS-codec DV-AVI files), with much nicer menus

than the Panasonic provides. The Panasonic 1-hour

encoding is excellent also, but the two decks we

tried (both were the one you are interested in) had

a hard time with some otherwise excellent brands of

DVD blanks (jumps occurred often on playback in

a deck that easily handled the CenDyne-burned disks

of all the brands tried). If you want to copy a disk

(including menus) back to the hard drive for

making multiple disks, the inexpensive Nero Burning

ROM software works well...