I bought this unit with the intent of copying my VHS collection and using this recorder in place of my VCR. After reading reviews from various sources, I bought this model over the next closest - Philips. (By the way, what's up with few brands providing black cabinetry?)

This unit is very easy to use. To get the most out of the unit READ THE MANUAL! One of the best features is the flexible record, allowing optimum recording for those more-than-2 hour-programs. This feature provides the highest quality recording available for the time that you desire to record. Unlike the VCR, where you'd have to record on the LP (or SLP) mode if a program is more than 2 hours, this option will give you the best picture it can in the disc-space provided. To my eye, programs of 2:20 look no worse than if it was recorded on SP.

Of course, some of my prerecorded VHS tapes are copyrighted (but not all) and can't be recorded - this was expected.

There is some concern regarding DVD-R playback on other... Read more

The wife & I decided to hold off on buying a DVD player until they could record, and those units were more affordable. To the DMR-E50K I can only ask: "Where have you been all my life?!?"
This is a great concept and a wonderful machine.
I currently have 2 VCR's slaved to one another then channeled through this unit, the satellite receiver and either the DVD player from my home theater, my camcorder or my digital camera connected to this machine. It is not an overstatement to say that this device is the workhorse of our Media Center. And it's up to the job.
Until I brought this out of the box, my wife was recording her craft shows to video tapes. Twenty-some of them, to be exact. This means that on a 6 hour tape, there might be 30-40 minutes of stuff she wants to save for future reference. Now, she can use the timer to record the whole show, but edit out the stuff she doesn't want to keep. Also, all those tapes will, someday, have the parts she wants to... Read more

Picture and sound are first rate. I am using the unit for backups of my video tape collection and for dumping programs off my Tivo unit. I am completely satisfied with the results except that I have also had the problems experienced by several of the negative reviewers. The unit worked fine for me on Verbatim, Sony and Panasonic disks but rejected 1 out of 3 of Fujifilm DVD-R. When it locked up on the Fuji disks it went into a "death spiral" where it would attempt to recover, fail but would not allow you to eject the disk. I had good luck unplugging the unit for 10 minutes and then holding the open button during the recover phase. This allowed me to remove the offending disk. Seems to work fine afterwards. Lesson is good disks mean good results. Anything else is at your own risk.