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Mine broke after only a few weeks. Slow and unfriendly user interface and remote control. Cheap stuff from China, what can I say? I wish things were different.

This is a very good product. No DVD Recorder is perfect, but this one records high quality video. It upconverts the picture, which is not as good as true HD, but it's good when viewed on DVD-RAM. The DVD-RAM is able to play in the full widescreen capacity of my HDTV, but DVD-R or DVD+R, etc. can only record in the 4:3 aspect, so I set the picture to letterbox and zoom in to watch it. The DVD+R is a pretty good picture, but a step down from DVD-RAM.

The unreliabilty comment in my title refers to when the machine needs to frequently be reset. It freezes up and might miss a timer recording if it isn't reset.

This is the best DVD Recorder I found on the market so far. I tested several of them, and this one worked the best for me. Highly recommended!

This recorder has many great features, including good picture quality, the ability to pause a recording (many older DVRs could not do this), and it is easy to use. The menu is fantastic; I have worked with older DVRs that had confusing and difficult menus. However, it also has its flaws. First of all, sometimes after you record a program and press "record" again to record something else it won't record. You have to completely re-start the machine in order to start recording a program. You have two options for powering the machine on as well. There is a "quick start" option and a regular one. The regular re-starting takes 2 full minutes before you can record. The "quick start" doesn't work properly. After trying the quick start I realized I couldn't use it. It would sometimes turn on, sometimes it wouldn't. It would sometimes turn on only to say the disc wasn't properly formatted, when it obviously was (as I've been successfully using the same discs since I bought the machine). Other times it wouldn't pick up the cable signal at all, saying "no signal found." This became very frustrating. I would have to unplug and re-plug the machine in and sometimes this wouldn't even work. Eventually I realized the "quick start" function was the main problem, which means you have to use the 2 minute regular start up, which is annoying when the machine won't record and you have to constantly re-start it.
It is also troublesome that the machine says it is 1080p, but is not Hi-Def and will not pick up Hi-Def signals. I believe that Panasonic purposefully marketed the player as "1080p" to trick people into thinking it works with Hi-Def. The picture quality of the DVDs is great due to this feature, however. The digital tuner is also useful because it is the only way you can record off of TV if you have a regular cable plug in and not a cable box (as in my case).
While this DVR has many good features, it also has some bugs that Panasonic should have worked harder to eliminate.

I bought the recorder to record new programs off of TV, but to also copy tapes I have onto DVD. It works, but it's a slow process, especially because it the DVR's inability to record over and over again without re-starting.

This unit barely manages to provide the services for which it is engineered. This isn't unusual for DVD-recorders. They are all absolutely awful. This, at one star, is one of the best of class, principally because you can, with patience, record shows onto DVDs. The problem is that the unit locks up in a never-ending variety of situations. If the engineers set out to make a totally undependable machine, they succeeded wildly.

The other "recorders" in the class are just slightly worse, which is to say, they are as useful for making recordings as you would be with a stick and a clay tablet.

If you purchase this unit, you're a fool. If this doesn't bother you, I suggest you lay in a store of long, narrow pointy things; it is only by pressing a teensy-weensy button through a tiny hole that you can reset the machine and snap it out of its paralyzed stupor. You'll be doing this several times a day. Have fun.