I'm looking for a DVD recorder to go with my Comcast/Motorola DVR and a 32" LCD HDTV, for use as an upconverting HDMI DVD player, and to be able to archive stuff from the DVR. Having a digital tuner in the DVDr is not a requirement.

I had sort of settled on the Panasonic DMR-EZ27K, but I am finding I can get a still new DMR-ES25S for much cheaper. How do these two units compare if their tuners are taken out of the equation?

I am looking to record 16x9 content (downsampled from HD to SD by the recorder I realize) onto DVD-R media, to be played back on a 16:9 TV. As I understand it, either of these would do that, with the only problem being that if I played the content on a 4:3 TV, the image would be squeezed.

Are there any distinguishing factors from one model to the next in terms of HDMI upconversion, stability, quality, etc?

For instance, I've read that the newer EZ27K's don't have great quality with the LP setting, unless you get the firmware update (that can only be obtained from contacting customer service), whereas I had read that the older ES25S has really good quality LP recording...

Any suggestions?

Edit: also I would like to play divx/xvid files burned on a DVD occasionally - does either of these do that?

I am looking to record 16x9 content (downsampled from HD to SD by the recorder I realize) onto DVD-R media, to be played back on a 16:9 TV. As I understand it, either of these would do that, with the only problem being that if I played the content on a 4:3 TV, the image would be squeezed.

I am not familiar with the DMR-ES25S but I believe that is last years model w/o digital tuner. I have the EZ17K with digital tuner. The new EZ series would be the only way to downsample a digital HD signal to an analog SD signal "by the recorder" as you state. However, if archiving from your DVR, as mentioned earlier, that may already have been done for you by the DVR and the ES series used to archive that from the DVR.


For instance, I've read that the newer EZ27K's don't have great quality with the LP setting, unless you get the firmware update (that can only be obtained from contacting customer service), whereas I had read that the older ES25S has really good quality LP recording...



I have read this myself from a few sources. Most of these people seem to be viewing their LP recordings on a very large screened TV. I have had no complaints at all with LP mode on my 25" analog set. Furthermore, I have not heard anything about a firmware update for any such problems.

Someone in the know may be able to confirm but I think the EZ series is the same as the ES series with the addition of a digital tuner. 500 line recording quality in LP mode was already implemented in the last series of recorders and I doubt the quality would have changed any from those to the EZ series. YMMV but I can't discern a difference between SP and LP modes when recording (downrez'ing) HD channels OTA. Recording digital cable from my cable box over S-video does not looke as good as OTA recording but is because of the difference in quality of the source and not the recorder itself.