Basically it is a nice machine and fairly easy to operate once you've read all the manual. However, I've found the unit that I have very temperamental. Recordings made on it often freeze and frequently it will not record. Recording start but after one minute the recorder switches to stand-by. Therefore not happy with it!

You do not have to be a genius to work this great machine.

I quite like the box and with the price of RAM media dropping it becomes very affordable. It's a bit of a pain that theDVD-R's I make are not always compatbile with other DVD players..this makes it difficult to pass on copies to friends. Also the RAM media wont read on other DVD players so it's all a bit frustrating. As a personal use box for recording the telly it's great. The flexible recoding with calculate the quality required to fit all of the time to the disc. It has fixed times as well eg 1,2,4 or 6 hours a 4.7Gig disc. It's a slow starter which is a bit of a pain if you suddenly want to record something..I normally leave it up and running while I watch the box incase something comes up I want to record.

The Panasonic DMR-E30EBS is a great machine - easy to use considering the fact that it's so powerful however it takes at least 20 seconds to get come alive when you power it up (while it scans the disk) and editing operations are a bit slow to complete. It can record up to six hours on a single sided disk but this is in very poor quality. Some people may be able to put up with the 4 hours mode, 2 hours is great, much better than standard vhs (similar or better quality to S-VHS). Disks are much more expensive per hour of recording time than tape but the flexibility is great.