Gonk, when you finish stocking the fridge and can see past the brush piles. Let me know what you feel about the DMR-E80. I have not made that purchase yet, but still intend too. So I’d be very curious as to what you think!

Hey Gonk

Glad to hear you had your power restored, finally. I work in a elec. utility, a dispatch and control room, so I am very aware of the issues behind the scenes, trained field crews, enough equipment, sourcing parts, poles, cables, wire... The main issue, though, at our utility is trained crews.

Your posts give me a some insite to the difficulties you and our customers have when the power is interupted. Yesterday, I had to switch 3200 customers off for 5-6 minutes to remove a failed peice of equipment from service. All I could think of is all those VCRs and alarm clocks flashing 12:00.

Thankfully no one in the Gonk house was injured, some suffering perhaps, but no one hurt.

I appreciate all of your posts, and I admire Ms. Lena's posts as well, all well written and entertaining. Thanks

Now I'm nervous - I was just catching up on some online stuff - saw this post and thought Doh!! I haven't checked any of my HT equipment. It's currently in an upstairs converted attic room that got so hot during my 9 day outage I closed the door and forgot about it. I'll be anxious all day till I can get home and test it.

I haven't checked any of my HT equipment

WHAT! ... "I'm beginning to seriously doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion" Donnie Darko

By the time I got back from an overnight business trip to east Tennessee last night, everybody had their power back. The last few hundred people went around 16 days or so.

TurnerF -- Glad to hear that you got power back. Hopefully your gear came through the storm unscathed.

tak9 -- It's remarkable how much we have grown to rely on electricity. The crews around here did an excellent job dealing with the damage that was done.

Smart Little Lena -- I've been poking at a review of my E80 for a while now (gathering notes while researching it, figuring out how I wanted to hook it up, ...), which is now pretty much done. Panasonic also just posted the manual for the E80 in the last day or so; it's a decent manual, although not as clear or complete as I would have liked. I'm still getting comfortable with it, but so far I'm pretty satisfied. My TV is not the greatest way to torture-test a DVD player (27" Mitsubishi without component input), so I can't offer much thought on the progressive scan performance. Rrom what I can tell, though, it's a respectable but not "reference quality" DVD player. And it's definitely better than recording to VHS.

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gonk -- Saloon Links | Pre/Pro Comparison Chart | 950 Review

Smart Little Lena -- I've got the Panasonic DMR-E80 pretty well squared away now, and if you want to read entirely too much about it you might want to skim through my notes on this page . The E80's not perfect, but all in all it's a pretty nice piece of equipment and I think it could reasonably serve as the only DVD player for someone casually into home theater. The E100 is due out in less than a month (120GB hard drive, DV input), but it retails for almost twice as much -- $1200 or so -- and the cheapest I've seen it online so far is around $900. The E80's going for as low as $525 or so online. Dad's starting to sort through his old tapes and is planning to drop some off at the house this weekend.

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gonk -- Saloon Links | Pre/Pro Comparison Chart | 950 Review

Gonk,

Your unbelievable (in the best way). I hope we cont. to have some of the same leanings towards purchases so that I can (coat-tail in) benefit from the umbrella of your considered reviews.

If I just want to buy something ….can I send it to you for a demo first??? (are you for hire...have you ever considered a secondary income as a professional reviewer?! )

Will be reading this tonight after work when I have time to do it justice. THANKS for the heads up!