Panasonic DMR-E55S Progressive Scan DVD Recorder / Player , Silver

We have owned this DVD recorder for about a month, ever since our 20-year-old VCR died. We were considering getting another VCR but then decided to make the leap to DVD, even though it was a less familiar technology to us. We were very pleased with how easy this machine was to set up and learn to use–it only took us half an hour to unpack, set up, record a test, and play back! We use a DVD-RAM disk–we got a 3-pack on Amazon.com for a lot less than $17 per disk. We’ve been recording at the EP speed, which gives you 8 hours per DVD-RAM disk. The playback at this speed is a bit grainy, but if you’re just catching up on a favorite show and don’t care that much about the picture quality, it’s fine. We haven’t tried the other recording speeds yet because EP is good enough for our purposes and we’d rather have the extra space on the disk. We’ve also played DVDs from the library, and the picture quality on those has been great–unlike what another reviewer said, we definitely feel you can use this machine just fine as a DVD player, though it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles our JVC DVD player has (but that’s fine with us–in fact, we’re thinking of selling the JVC player and replacing it with a second one of these Panasonic recorders). So, so far we haven’t had any problems, though we do have two questions. First, is it possible to stop the disk in a particular place, turn off the machine, then resume playing in that place later on? So far we haven’t been able to do this. We can do it when we don’t turn off the machine, but once we do, the disk goes back to the beginning, which means that to get to the same place you were, you have to remember how far along the disk was (e.g., 14:40) and fast-forward to that spot. The second thing that’s puzzling us is that there doesn’t seem to be an a.m. or p.m. switch when you’re setting up a program (the long way) to record. So, say it’s 10:30 a.m. and you want to record a program that starts at 1:00 p.m.–the only way we’ve found to do this is to first get the display to 11:59 a.m., then use the arrow key to go up 1 minute to 12:00 p.m., then enter in 1:00 p.m. A bit cumbersome–it’s hard to believe there isn’t a way around this, but we haven’t found anything in the manual.