Panasonic DMR-ES10 for parts only worth it?
 

Not having the funds for a better VCR or standalone TBC, I'm looking to pick up a Panasonic DMR ES10 or maybe 15 as a pass-through device, and prices can vary a fair amount. I started wondering, if I have no interest or use for using it as an actual DVD recorder, does it really matter if it's not working? Obviously, it has to at least POWER ON, but, say, if the DVD tray is broken, or the lens mechanism or something to do with the physical playing and recording of discs is the only issue, is it still good to go as a pass-through device? I guess that would depend on the person selling it knowing for sure that dvd recording/playback is the only issue and nothing else.

I would be careful with that since most sellers don't know or don't want to tell what's exactly wrong with the unit, Unless the seller is willing to make a demonstration in person or via a video that the passthrough feature is indeed working. Off course if the price is low enough that is worth the risk then I think you could give it a shot.

yeah, even the "parts only" listings seem to run for 20 bucks or more, plus 20 or more shipping. :P

All of the DMR models have power supply caps that go bad and that's what prevents power up 95% of the time. Good news is that it doesn't permanently damage anything most of the time you don't need fancy equipment to diagnose them - Whatever brand they used, when they do fail - it's visually obvious. That or you could just replace all of the power supply caps on the secondary side which is fewer than 10.

The reason the power supply caps go bad is that they are active even when the unit is in standby/powered off mode, hence the hours add up quickly even when not in use when plugged in for 5-10 years straight.

They also have some SMT caps on the image processing boards that are almost always out of spec or completely open, but when those fail, they almost never stop the unit from functioning. Hard to believe the engineers would put caps in there that aren't needed for functioning, but you'd be surprised how many bad caps old equipment can have and still appear to function normally. I can't say if the picture quality is better when you recap those SMT caps, but I do recap mine anyway "just in case it helps". I've pretty much never heard of anyone recapping anything other than the power supplies on those - but I also don't think they bother testing anything internally if the unit powers up and you get the expected image output.

A lot of failed ES10/15 units have irreparable 000000 errors, board failures.

These days, eBay is mostly crap being flipped by know-nothings. Seriously, look at all the eBay sellers on Youtube, often bragging, most of whom know nothing about what they buy/sell aside from the price one sold last time. Details like actually functioning are never considered.

Hmm. I hadn't heard of the 00000 error. Maybe that's what happens when the SMT caps go "bad enough". If anyone has a 000000 error and are otherwise going to scrap it, I'll attempt the repair for free and if the repair does work you can have it back for just the cost of shipping. PM me if interested.

I have one in the attic.

Mm, nothing I'm reading here inspires a lot of confidence! Caveat emptor, as always, I guess.

Curious if there are any known "good" sellers/flippers anyone might suggest? Of course, I suspect with greater reliability comes greater cost. I may just bite the bullet and try one; I guess if it doesn't work out, I can turn around and resell it as "parts only/not working" to someone who knows how to work on such things, and not feel I'm being shady.

If you are in north america, you can broaden the search to the EH50 (es10 + hdd), EH55 (es15 + hdd), and ES25 (ES15-ish with HDMI out), and ES16 (Canadian market version of ES15), though it might not help a lot. (The ES20 is also from the es10 generation but at least the north american version of that one uses completely different hardware and doesn't work well, the european/international version may be different.) The ES30 and ES35 also work but those are gonna be rare and/or overprices since they're combo with VCRs (though otherwise equivialent to ES10 and ES15 respectively afaik, there is an ES40 variant as well but that one may have the same chipset as the ES20, not sure).

If you are in europe/australia/south america/elsewhere you have a lot more options since panasonic kept using their own chipset on later models. In the US they swapped chipsets after the transitions to digital and used a very simple video decoder ic that doesn't have all the fancy stabilizing features so the later US/Canada models aren't very useful.

Also the EH75V, but it probably has the most problems of any machine. I didn't even know about this model until recent years, because most seem to have failed.

A big issue is that it weighs more than anything else I've ever had, includings 80s VCRs. It just gets destroyed in shipping. Heavy unit, heavy HDD, heavy optical drive, heavy transport.

The only thing interesting here is the VCR could record to a weird mode beyond EP/SLP.

Does the HDMI out on the ES25 bypass digital to analog conversion and if so would that output be suitable for capture/restoration purposes? Seems like this would be a good argument for getting this model instead of the 10/15.

Yeah, afaik it's the only one of the north american panasonic dvd-recorders that has both the panasonic chipset and HDMI output. It does however seem to only output in progressive scan mode without upscaling so you have to manually re-interlace the result according to this post. You would also need a HDMI splitter to deal with HDCP, as these and most other dvd-recorders refuse to even handshake over HDMI with anything that isn't HDCP enabled. The quality difference is probably quite marginal over s-video/component. Though, unless it's different to the european models you do avoid the ~8 px blanking on the sides and any ringing/artifacting coming from that if using the hdmi output and the issue with the outputs turning off if the recorder isn't detecting a video signal. The latter doesn't happen on unrecorded sections on tape but can happen on sections of tape that was recorded over with the video input of the vcr disconnected.

The models sold in europe and oceania do also support NTSC and do support interlaced 480i/586i though those would have to be imported ofc. Funai-made dvd-recorders also have similarly good stabilization HDMI (not sure if they have interlaced SD or not) buf afaik have issues with flickering and possibly going to blue back on bad signals.

No, it does not.