I've had a few days to play around with this Panasonic and have to say it works very well!
Even in the 6 hour mode the picture doesn't look much worse than the original standard-def DirecTV picture which is pretty soft to begin with.
It also claims to upscale the VHS when copying to DVD, however like most it won't copy prerecorded tapes, maybe there's a hack somewhere to disable the Macrovision...
the model# is DMR-ES35V and it was $244 on sale at Circuit City.