Not worth it

I bought this back in Sept and was very pleased with it at first. However cracks started to appear when I began using it in earnest.

The first fault I found was a movie I recorded off Sky onto the HDD and later transfered to DVD. When playing back, at the most critical stage of the movie (it would have to be), the DVD locked up. It also caused a lockup when played on my PC. As I had deleted the recording off the HDD I could not determine if it was the DVD media or just a one-off glitch. However, this problem happened again during a movie taped off sky and while watching it from HDD, so it had to be the LiteOn.

The third problem was similar to the first two, except the movie video playback speed suddendly slowed towards the end but the sound continued normal speed, making this third movie also interrupted. Three strikes and you are out IMHO.

The forth problem is during mpeg playback. I have tried various DivX and Xvid videos in avi and divx format, even going so far as to purchase a professional production package from Roxio. Unfortunately I have not been able to get a single one to play back without a problem on my LiteOn. They all play back fine under Windows Media player and the Linux VLC media player, but no luck on the LiteOn. Problems range from distorted picture, distored sound through to the sound sync slowly slipping with the video. It drove me nuts trying to create a single mpeg-4 movie that would play back correctly. Eventually I just gave up and created DVDs from my videos and copied those over.

I have also encounted the lockup while navigating which has previously been reported.

I have upgraded the firmware twice now and the problems still remain.

Do yourself a favour - just do not buy it.

Kiss DP600 poor aftersales

Bought for Christmas present in 2006. Went faulty, returned in Jan 2007 to manufacturer at my expense. Not seen it since, it's now June 2007!!!

Pixmania have really poor after sales service. BTW Amazon are great, just wish their partners were the same.

Not impressed with Ellion

Not over impressed with this machine. Bought it last June, hardly used but when did got itself into a spin and then eventually could not get a picture signal or anything. Was sent another machine under warranty and this did not even work at all, no power no nothing. Would not recommend.

Superb quality recording

Great Machine, well built, quiet, easy to set up (it took a while to get it to talk to my Philips Freeview box but this was NOT the fault of the Panasonic which makes it easy to adjust the input parameters to match another machine), plenty of connectivity (although the lack of firewire may disappoint some), superb quality playback and recording even the long play mode (4 hours on a DVD, 70 odd on the hard drive) which is on a par with VHS, even the 8 hour mode is acceptable though I'm not sure I'll ever use it. Almost instant recording start from cold, other functions take a bit longer so I guess it can save video to a buffer while it boots its operating system. Generally easy to use with a reasonably well designed remote. The learning curve is steep but the machine does do a lot. Simple editing of titles is possible on the hard drive. This is mainly limited to deleting sections (ads for example), entering chapter marks, making playlists and various file mangement functions like entering names and changing the thumnails of titles. DVD-RAM compatability makes it easy to transfer titles to a PC for further editing though. Dubbing edited titles from the hard drive to DVD is simple and quick (at least once you turn high speed dubbing on, for some strange reason it is disabled by default).

A few things stop it from getting five stars. The manual is poor, well indexed and complete but badly laid out and fails to explain anything (Panasonic should have a look at Canon's excellent digicam manuals). The SD card player is an almost useless gimmick, the quality of pictures displayed on an ordinary TV is very poor and they appear slowly. The layout of buttons on the front panel is less than intuitive in use. Because the power button is under the DVD slot and the eject button is on the other side of the machine often turn the thing of when I want to eject a DVD! 80Gb is also a bit mean for the HDD, although it's proved to be plenty so far including a 160Gb drive should only have added fractionally to the cost.

I've had it for around 4 months now and despite the minor gripes I'm very pleased I bought it. I'm not sure any of the competition in a similar price range beat it.