I've got an older Panasonic that we still use some ( DMR-E80 ) - it's worked out well for us, even after four and a half years of service. I originally purchased it for archiving VHS tapes (old home videos, some going back to the early 80's). We also used it quite a bit for time shifting TV using the built-in hard drive. I don't know that I'd be very interested in time shifting via DVD media, but time shifting via the hard drive worked very nicely. However, I've scaled back our use of it since we got a DVR cable box last May. At this point, all we use the old Panny for is copying the occasional VHS tape (very rarely) and playing back some odds and ends still sitting on the hard drive. In many cases, I've even started using my single DVD-RAM disc (the disc provided with my Panny back in 2003) to move data straight from the hard drive to my PC, where I use some software there to author DVD's and burn on the internal DVD drive. I also use an IEEE-1394 card in my PC to archive video from our MiniDV camera to DVD.

Considering the offerings available for both VHS and recordable DVD hardware today, I'd recommend against using either for time shifting. That particular duty seems to have become the domain of various hard drive-based DVR's, which do the job well. It sounds like a new Toshiba would be the best bet for archiving old VHS tapes from your existing VHS decks (a duty for which the absence of dual-layer support isn't going to be an issue - besides, single layer media is a lot less expensive). Depending on how many tapes you have, you might even consider a video capture card and computer to archive the tapes onto DVD.