Panasonic DMR-BW850
The Panasonic DMR-BW850’s major features:
- A 500GB hard drive allows up to 70 hours of footage to be stored.
- Two HD tuners let you record two channels at the same time. These tuners give access to Freeview channels, and you can record in high definition (HD) any programmes that have been broadcast in HD.
- It's a blu-ray player and recorder. So you can transfer content from the hard drive on to blank blu-ray discs as well as play blu-ray movies and standard DVDs.
- A feature called Viera Cast provides direct access to YouTube and Picasa online photo albums (you need to plug in a network cable first).
Many functions
As you’d expect, there’s a learning curve in getting this device running. Switching between TV watching, hard-drive playback, recording and blu-ray is probably the most confusing aspect.
Other than that, setting up is straightforward. There were few hiccups in finding all the available Freeview channels – and recording snippets of TV shows was as simple as pressing a button on the remote. Playing back this footage was also simple, as was scheduling the recording times.
However, the BW850 can’t schedule more than a month in advance and that can be annoying if you want to record a show’s whole season.
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