Home Theatre/TV: Panasonic DMR-BW850 Blu-ray Disc Recorder – Review – 79
So here’s the one everyone’s been waiting for, a Blu-ray disc recorder. Well, in theory. Although early adopters have been straining against the shackles of non-availability, there wasn’t much point to it until HD television broadcasting became widespread here.
The arrival of Freeview’s terrestrial HD service was likely the trigger for manufacturers, in this case Panasonic, to ice the business case for introducing a Blu-ray recorder here – even though far from all the stuff that rides the HD superhighway has been recorded to take full advantage of the technology.
Panasonic’s offering has a pair of HD digital tuners and allows extended-time recording of digital broadcasts in up to full-HD quality, so you can simultaneously record two digital broadcasts while watching something else. And yes, the surround sound (Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, or HE-AAC) signal and subtitles that are included in digital broadcasts can be recorded and played back.
Maybe we should think of the BW850 as more of a media centre than a mere recorder as it offers many of a personal video recorder’s features. It records to its 500GB HDD or a dual-layer Blu-ray disc, and has a USB port and an SD memory card slot for still images and viewing video in AVCHD format. There’s also an HD archiving function to save full-HD images from an SD card onto a Blu-ray disc or the hard drive.
More: the unit is BD-Live compatible (Profile 2.0), letting users take advantage of interactive content and net downloads incorporated into many Blu-ray movies. Viera Cast lets you watch YouTube and Picasa Web albums via on-screen menus.
An improved MPEG-4 compression system allows the recording of up to 72 hours of full-HD onto the hard drive and something like 240 hours in lesser formats – it offers not one, not two, not five, but 10 recording quality options! Of course, the more you stuff onto the disc, the lower the quality, which sort of defeats the whole purpose.
At the back, connectors include HDMI 1.3, 10/100 Ethernet, Component, S-Video and composite outputs plus coax and optical digital. It’s possible to record from external devices via composite, S-Video and DV.
The features go on and on, allowing buyers to feel better about the price tag, but the bottom lines are that despite the apparent complexity, it’s an easy and reasonably intuitive unit to use and the recorded results are stunningly good and true to the original. Movie enthusiasts particularly should enjoy the 1080p, 24 frames per second video playback and 1080p upscaling on DVDs.
DISHING UP A YOUTUBE DIET
The bloke-sized remote includes a dedicated Viera Cast button to get users onto the net and into YouTube and Picasa. Similar to the iPhone’s, the YouTube menu offers a choice of Featured, Most Viewed and Top Rated clips, as well as a Search option using a keyboard that appears on-screen. Users can choose which YouTube site they want to watch: ‘Worldwide’ or a choice of 19 countries including our neighbour to the left. YouTube clips don’t play full screen by default, but on the right side with their details to the left.
PHIL HANSON
Tech Specs
Type: Blu-ray Disc recorder, 500GB HDD
Sources: Twin HD digital tuners, SD slot, USB terminal 
Sound: Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS-HD1 and HE-AAC decoder; 96kHz surround re-master for BD, DVD, CD, MP3 and DivX
Networking: Compatible with Viera Cast (YouTube, Picasa), BD-Live and Bonusview (Blu-ray playback only)
Dimensions: 430 x 66 x 330mm (W/H/D)
Weight: 4.1kg
PROS
- A Swiss Army Knife of recorders
- Quality in, quality out
CONS
- Early adoption comes at a price
VERDICT
A versatile, feature-packed intro to Blu-ray recording
CONTACT
This review is from Tone issue 79. Click here to check it out.
Loading ...