kevinpt
06-15-07, 07:23 PM
I purchased a DMR-EZ37VK a little over a month ago based primarily on my great experience with the Panasonic RV-31 player that eventually kicked the bucket. Unfortunately this new player has provided nothing but frustration. I am keeping my fingers crossed that there will be a firmware update to correct these issues in the near future or else I will have to add Panasonic to my "do not buy" list.
The biggest problem with this unit is that is crashes a lot. When it does crash you have to hold the power button on the unit for 10 seconds or so and wait for it to go through its lengthy initialization process. This alone is unacceptable. Most perturbing is that so far it has crashed 100% of the time whenever I have played any commercially produced audio CD in it. This unit has also crashed on me during startup when it is trying to read a disc, when it is trying to read the menus created by itself on a DVD-RAM, and when changing channels on the tuner. The unit once "partially" crashed in which I could still change channels with the up-down buttons but it would not accept entry from the numeric keypad.
The audio CD crashes have happened while navigating across tracks and spontaneously during playback but most often when the unit is changing to the next track. I have never successfully played through an entire audio CD without the unit crashing.
Other annoyances are the way this unit insists on autoplaying whatever it finds in the VHS or disc drive whenever you power the unit on. I expect autoplay only when I power the unit on with the play button and it should come up in a neutral state otherwise. This is how the RV-31 worked. Why they had to screw this up I don't know. This autoplay problem is most annoying when you have a DVD in the drive that immediately locks out the stop button to show you ads/previews/etc.
When playing a DVD, the player spontaneously shows the status pop-up without any user input. This happens at least half a dozen times over the course of two hours. I am perplexed as to how they could release the product with this glaring bug.
There is sometimes bizzarre behavior with the front panel display getting stuck on showing the track number on an audio CD and never switching back to the time display. The RV-31 showed both simultaneously.
When the tuner is trying to pick up a weaker signal that is dropping out it becomes completely non-responsive for a few seconds. This is very annoying if you are just trying to surf past a channel you didn't want to see in the first place. Even worse, the unit stores your keypresses in a buffer so you can end up skipping past the channel you wanted when it finally does resume.
One of the things I really liked about the RV-31 was its great, responsive fast-forward and reverse that included intelligible audio on the first stage of fast-forward. The 37V is now extremely slow to engage fast-forward and reverse (worse than Sony) and it is hard to get to a position you want without overshooting. You can forget about any audio too.
The biggest problem with this unit is that is crashes a lot. When it does crash you have to hold the power button on the unit for 10 seconds or so and wait for it to go through its lengthy initialization process. This alone is unacceptable. Most perturbing is that so far it has crashed 100% of the time whenever I have played any commercially produced audio CD in it. This unit has also crashed on me during startup when it is trying to read a disc, when it is trying to read the menus created by itself on a DVD-RAM, and when changing channels on the tuner. The unit once "partially" crashed in which I could still change channels with the up-down buttons but it would not accept entry from the numeric keypad.
The audio CD crashes have happened while navigating across tracks and spontaneously during playback but most often when the unit is changing to the next track. I have never successfully played through an entire audio CD without the unit crashing.
Other annoyances are the way this unit insists on autoplaying whatever it finds in the VHS or disc drive whenever you power the unit on. I expect autoplay only when I power the unit on with the play button and it should come up in a neutral state otherwise. This is how the RV-31 worked. Why they had to screw this up I don't know. This autoplay problem is most annoying when you have a DVD in the drive that immediately locks out the stop button to show you ads/previews/etc.
When playing a DVD, the player spontaneously shows the status pop-up without any user input. This happens at least half a dozen times over the course of two hours. I am perplexed as to how they could release the product with this glaring bug.
There is sometimes bizzarre behavior with the front panel display getting stuck on showing the track number on an audio CD and never switching back to the time display. The RV-31 showed both simultaneously.
When the tuner is trying to pick up a weaker signal that is dropping out it becomes completely non-responsive for a few seconds. This is very annoying if you are just trying to surf past a channel you didn't want to see in the first place. Even worse, the unit stores your keypresses in a buffer so you can end up skipping past the channel you wanted when it finally does resume.
One of the things I really liked about the RV-31 was its great, responsive fast-forward and reverse that included intelligible audio on the first stage of fast-forward. The 37V is now extremely slow to engage fast-forward and reverse (worse than Sony) and it is hard to get to a position you want without overshooting. You can forget about any audio too.