Panasonic DVD Recorders Gaffney SC

The Panasonic DMR-EZ47VK ($330 Buy Now ) can be thought of as a digital video Swiss Army knife. It has a built in ATSC tuner, DVD recording capability, VHS Playback and dubbing, and its an upconverting DVD player (up to 1080p via HDMI) to boot. So with all this capability we were excited when the unit showed up at the home offices of the HT Guys. On paper this device was too good to be true. So how did it fare in the real world?

ATSC Tuner
The unit comes with a built in ATSC tuner which will make your current TV ready for the analog cutoff. That is if over the air is how you are getting your current TV signals. More likely its not but its still nice to know that you can record those beautiful digital signals in their pristine quality. However, while the player is able pick up the digital HDTV signal it has no way to record them in 720p or 1080i. But what you get is a very clean 480p (DVD quality) signal recorded to a DVD. An area of disappointment though is if you are want this device to act as an HDTV source for your HD Ready TV you are out of luck. The player won't pass an HD signal through to the TV. We thought it was odd that the ATSC tuner does not support an Electronic Program Guide. Although the interface is straight forward to use, it makes setting up recordings a bit more like the old VCRs. You really never know you recorded what you want until you see it on the screen.

DVD Playback (Upconverting Performance)
We evaluated the picture with both objective and subjective tests. For the objective tests we used the HQV DVD from Silicon Optix. We connected the player to our Mitsubishi WD-65831 and set the player to output 1080p via the HDMI cable. We found that the player did a great job with the Color Bar test and a decent job with the Jaggies. The jaggies test evaluates the players capabilities of dealing with moving objects. Detail Enhancement, Noise Reduction and Motion Adaptive tests were a bit too difficult for this player but it did a great job with 3:2 detection. Overall the DMR-EZ47VK is a decent upconverting DVD player. Definitely an improvement over a standard DVD player.

Because the HQV disc is set up to stress the DVD players capabilities, we also wanted to take a look at how this player performed with regular movies. Here we pulled out our old standbys, Blackhawk Down and Spiderman 2 Superbit. The player did an excellent job with these movies. The night scope vision scenes did not appear grainy and detail was highly visible in dark scenes. Spiderman 2 looked incredible! We can't wait for the Spiderman 3. Digital audio, both Dolby Digital and DTS, was transmitted via the HDMI cable. So one cable brought both video and audio to the receiver. The whole chain, (Mitsubishi DLP, Panasonic DVD Recorder, an...