Wasn't quite as east to setup as literature suggested, naturally, but everything seems to work OK and it does communicate with TV. Upconversions work just fine. well worth the monies.

Easy to use. Just wish it had a program guide so i would not have to spend time selecting the date, time, and creating a title for each program I wish to record. At least the selection of date and time is pretty easy. Worth the money.

I love this DVR. I look at stores in the area and was surprised to see that all of them was missing a tuner. How could this be! I like to record Judge Judy and other shows when I am at work and watch it as my decompression after a hard day at work. I love the "time shifting" aspect on not worrying about missing my favorite shows. I currently have nine shows that I record each week. The commercial skip buttom is great as I fast forward to get back to my show.

Hook up and programming was very easy.

What I wanted was a DVD Recorder/VCR with a T.V. Tuner. I went to three major electronic stores and all three had a the same LG, Sony, and Panasonic model. I had known about the copyright protection foibles with the Sony and I don't know much about LG so I chose the Panasonic. My setup is quite simple, I have basic cable (channels 2-70) with no set-top box or anything, and the T.V. it's hooked up to has broken A/V Jacks so the built-in RF Modulator is nice to have. The multiple I/0 is very helpful because I do capture VHS tapes with a USB device that has a S-Video input. And I could see how one would find the SD Card, USB, and DV inputs helpful. Some could find that the extra speed on the VHS drive to be pointless (VP, offering 5x the recording time of SP) but I liked it even though the picture quality isn't very good even by VHS standards. Finalizing DVDs to be played on all players is a cinch, the device says it takes 15 minutes but it takes about 15 seconds. And the disc played on an 8-year old DVD player fine. Another great thing is it supports DVD-RAM recording which is like Tivo; you can watch the disc while it's still recording and record multiple things at once. The 9.4 GB of storage space allows 16 hours of recording time on EP mode!

Now for the cons; the auto channel setup is horrendously slow. And somehow it defaults DVD-RAM recording to be on 16:9 aspect ratio (it is changeable to 4:3 but annoying). You cannot channel surf, it's just too slow. One time when going from playing a video game on input 2 going back to normal T.V. the machine thought that every channel was #29. I went through the auto channel setup twice and it said it couldn't find any channels, when I unplugged/replugged the machine it somehow fixed itself. Another weird thing is that if you open up the disc tray while the DVD is still playing it goes into some diagnostic thing and freezes. I did the unplug/replug thing and it was fine.

Consumer Reports states that this is the best DVD recorder with a VCR. Trust me, the model is good but not great. But if this is the best DVD recorder that's pretty sad. Too bad the Sony isn't better because that's what I would've bought if it could record T.V. shows and knowing Sony it's probably over-priced.

I purchased this unit to work with Panasoni's Viera plasma tv. I mainly purchased it to dub my old VHS home movies to DVD. I also liked the idea of having an up-converting DVD player at the same time, with over the air digital recording if needed. The up converting feature is close to high-def, but you will experience some picture stretch. If you have VHS tapes that were recorded in mono, the audio in play back will have to be set to mono or hissing will be heard. The picture quality is excellent on the new over the air digital channels, same for DVD playback. The operational manual is a little overwhelming at first, it took me about five hours to play with all the features and test them out. The biggest failure of this unit is the amount of time it takes to navigate from different menus and sub features. One however has to consider that there are not many units on the market in this price/feature range.