Review of Panasonic DMR-ES15 DVD Recorder

The DMR ES-15EB DVD isn’t the most amazing looking DVD recorder we’ve ever seen, in fact, it’s plasticky, silver design is nothing short of tacky but it has the advantage of being both silver and black, making it compatible with most TV designs. It’s slim and surprisingly light (due to the plastic design) and once it’s set up it does actually look okay. We like how Panasonic have designed the set so that the bottom part where the buttons are located splays out, making it easier to see, and consequently use. The black central area homes the DVD disc tray which opens nice and smoothly and is particularly responsive to touch. Moving from left to right, you’ll find the power-on button, followed by the flip-down hidey hole housing a DV connection for a camcorder, then there are more camcorder connections including S-Video cable and audio/video in cable ports. The next connection along is the external equipment link (see features to find out how cool this is). Next in line are two channel and down buttons, then the normal open and close button, stop, play and record buttons are found at the far end.

It took us about ten minutes from getting the DMR ES-15EB DVD recorder out of the box to watching a DVD. Making it much more simple are the layman instructions that are designed for 10 years olds - perfect.

Compatibility is key with the DMR ES-15EB DVD Recorder. To get the boring listy stuff out of the way, recordable discs include DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, +R and +RW and playable discs include DVD-RAM, DVD-R (DVD-Video format, MP3, JPEG), DVD-R DL (dual layer), DVD-RW, +R, +R DL (double layer), +RW, DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, CD-Audio (CD DA), Video CD, CD-R/RW (CD-DA, Video CD, SVCD, MP3, JPEG formatted discs) and SVCD. It’s boring but I’m sure you’ll agree - very impressive. A really nice feature that we like is the External Equipment Link which is great for recording programmes from SKY Digital and STB/digital terrestrial receivers using the timer programming option. Excellent news for those people who refuse to fork out £40 a month for SkyPlus. The remote control is well labelled and straightforward to use with heaps of menu shortcuts. The FR (flexible recording) feature means the unit automatically selects a recording rate between XP (high quality) and EP (extra long play 8 hours) that enables recordings to fit in the remaining disc space with the best possible recording quality. Nice work Panasonic!! Menus are detailed and easy to use, we set up VideoPlus recording and found it very simple and completely hassle-free. It’s got a direct navigator feature which allows you to view thumbnails of scenes and select the one you want to watch. You can play MP3 and watch your still digital pictures (JPEG), browsing through the menus we found we could compose slide shows, rotate photos, zoom in and out and view properties. You can also edit your recording’s titles, chapter and playing chapters and create, edit and play your play lists. The DVD management feature allows you to format, protect and finalize your discs too. The DMR ES-15EB DVD Recorder has a PAL colour system and a Dolby Digital recording system which work well together to provide some awesome results.

The DMR ES-15EB DVD Recorder really impressed us with its performance. It put on a really good show with both recording and playback. Every action it performed was hassle-free without any drawbacks like skipping or interference of any kind. We tried out every possible way of recording and in every attempt we were more than happy with the performance and found that the results were exceptionally accurate.

It is such a shame that the Panasonic DMR ES-15EB DVD Recorder only has a analogue tuner, we would have liked to have seen the word ‘FreeView’ in the specifications but unfortunately not. It also lacks a RGB scart input which is a big drawback for its future connectivity. Apart from these two drawbacks, the DMR ES-15EB DVD Recorder is great at entry-level, ultimately easy to use and very compatible.