- Average user rating: 1.5 stars out of 31 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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29 out of 29 people found this review helpful
2.0 stars
"Almost great...but frustrating!"
Pros: Ease of use and copy quality is excellent
Cons: Firmware is buggy...hangs on finalization and poor editing
Summary: I am converting years of VHS and 8mm archived tapes to dvd. This unit seemed to have it all until...locking up once a dvd is copied but not finalized. Needed to unplug the unit to recycle. I am exchanging it to try AGAIN as most features work well and the copy quality is excellent.
But I think that Panasonic needs a firmware fix. I'd wait until a model upgrade is released. Must downrate from a 9 to a 4.
- 1 reply to this review
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This is apparently a new model replacing ES30V, which was highly rated by CU. Like all new models the firmware has bugs: I wasn't able to play a rented DVD because the "ratings" parameter was set to 0 and couldn't be changed (Page 40-41 of the user guide). I called the Panasonic help line and after a 15 minute wait reached a very polite man who tried to lead me through a general reset (not in the user guide) , but it did not fix the probletm. He then gave me the phone number of an authorized Panasonic service outlet, who loaded new firmware, fixing the problem. It took 2 days. Hope that was the only problem.
I was lucky that a service facility was within driving distance. I would hate to ship the whole box to some distant location and wait weeks to get it back.
I was disappointed that Panasonic is learning from that big software company on the West coast instead of from Honda...
