Expensive Panasonic digital video recorder was a mistake
March 21, 2018
About 10 years ago, I bought a souped-up Panasonic digital video recorder with a hard drive. The idea was to edit the movies I made of my family through the years and to make copies to send to family members. It was immensely disappointing.
I had purchased a Panasonic movie camera that recorded on a small disk, a DVD-RAM. I thought it would be the latest, greatest thing in movie making. However, the information put on this early type of disk was actually analog. This style of movie camera didn’t catch on, so the disks became hard to find. And, the ability to edit the movies on the camera was limited.
A review of the Panasonic digital video recorder on Crutchfield by Steve Kindig said:
The versatile DMR-E85H lets you record from the hard drive to a recordable DVD-RAM or DVD-R disc, or from DVD-RAM to the hard drive. Many people like to use the hard drive or erasable DVD-RAM discs for recording weekly shows, while saving "keeper" material to write-once DVD-R discs. By using the Play List function, you can rearrange the sequence of video segments on the hard drive before recording to disc. That makes preserving family videos and personal movie libraries a lot easier. Think of the possibilities!
Unfortunately, I was never able to edit my movies from the hard drive of the digital video recorder. It was difficult to operate so I put it in the box and took it back to The Good Guys and asked for help in how to use it. The customer service representative said it wasn’t their job to help me figure out how to use a product I purchased from them. I took my box and went home, disappointed and frustrated.
A couple of years later, the hard drive was continually locked up. I couldn’t even play a DVD on it.
Last year, I junked the expensive Panasonic DVD player, taking it to Best Buy to be recycled. Then, I bought a new, much cheaper one. My Canon Rebel T5i takes video, so I’m now editing movies in iMovie and making copies of them on my iMac.
I saved the box and the instruction manual for the digital video recorder so I could write about it. I’m cleaning up getting ready for company, so now I can recycle them.
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