Are these Panasonic DVD recorders any good?
 

- Does the Panasonic DMR-EH59/69 produce the same results as the DMR-E80H, TBC wise?

- Is the Panasonic LQ-MD800 good as a PAL/NTSC unit? Does it have TBC?

- Can the MPEG-2 video data on Panasonic IDE HDDs be copied onto a computer (without burning it to a DVD on the DMR itself)?

If it's one sold in PAL markets it should work well for stabilizing. If it's a north american one likely not (though not sure if there was ever a EH59 sold in north america.)

the LQ-MD800 seems to have a similar menu interface to the older panasonics (pre-2005) but no idea if it has similar ICs and tbc capability to those. (The PAL EH59/69 and other PAL panasonics from at least the 2005 models like the ES10 and newer does also support NTSC if that is a need).

I believe ISOBuster is capable of recovering data off the hard-drives without much hassle. Alternatively it can be done by some recovery applications like testdisk but those don't know the file system layout so are just looking for file headers, which means you get dump of the mpeg2 files of the video, which can have been split up, and in some random order.