The unit has several problems, most of them related to the digital drive. The VCR portion I didn't have as many problems with as others report, no ejected tapes, etc. but it has its own irks. First, the RF In. Was very staticy, peppered with little colored dash marks. Other units did not display this static when the cable was connected. Plus, its search function is an abysmal failure. You can't search to a predefined position on the tape, you can only search to a position in X hours/minutes, not a precise time into the tape. While this works fine when the counter is at 0:00 at the start of the tape, but, when it's not the start of the tape anymore, searching becomes an absolute mess, especially when you want to go backwards.

The digital unit, though, is where this dog starts to bark. For DVD's, the way it manuevers through chapters, etc. is not exactly the most user friendly method. There's no easily programmable A to B function. Plus, a real annoyance with CD's. The programmer's apparently decided to code the CD player to automatically skip 2 seconds at the end of each track. Which is fine for music CD's; most people who burn their own discs tend to remove the 2 second gap anyway... I don't. I like the 2 seconds, and, automatically skipping the gaps, WITHOUT giving the user the option to turn this off, makes playing audio CD's impossible, as the last 2 seconds of a track's lines and the first 2 seconds of lines in the next track get swallowed up by the skipping! Poor, poor design.

While the digital drive does accept writable and rewritable CD and DVD formats, except for DVD-RAM, this is very little consolation compared to how much is left out and what doesn't work right. PASS on this model.

Poor (Rating: 1.00)
Review : I received this as a Christmas gift last year. My father purchased it at an electronics store. He was told it was "the Cadillac" of dvd/vcr players (I had picked out a less expensive item), but the salesman talked him into "upgrading". Poor choice. It took 3 months, which happened to be the warrenty period, then the vcr started rejecting tapes. Some tapes must be inserted over and over again until the machine accepts them. Other tapes are never accepted. The dvd player works but the sound has to be turned clear up in order to hear. This is deafening when I turn the dvd off. Overall I feel this is a bad choice. Save your money and buy a different product

VCR Has Problems (Rating: 1.00)
Review : I had the unit just over a year and only used the VCR ten times or so. It started rejecting and eating tapes. I called Panasonic, described the problem, and told them of the many people on-line who reported problems with the unit. Since it is out of warranty, Panasonic was unsympathic. They do not seem to care that they manufactured a faulty device, and are not going to do more than their warranty obligates them.

When I had problems with a Sharp Camcorder that was out of warranty, and Sharp knew that they were at fault, they sent me a new model free.

Panasonic knows this is a faulty unit, and is hoping that customers won't use it enough to discover the problem within the warranty period.