IN DEPTH REVIEW: Panasonic DMR-BW850 HDTV Blu-ray recorder - one with the lot

Until recently, buying an off-the-shelf digital video recorder meant choosing between watching high definition television or the ability to archive recordings to disc. Panasonic came to the rescue with its range of Blu-ray and DVD recorders with built-in twin HD tuners, letting you record high-def TV directly to disc or else record to the hard drive with the option of archiving it to disc later.

Panasonic's second generation DMR-BW850 Blu-ray recorder offers a few new features that make it a tempting all-in-one option for any lounge room. Firstly it features an improved MPEG-4 compression system that lets you squeeze up to 240 hours of high definition television recordings onto the hefty 500GB hard drive ($2199) - although it only holds 72 hours in "Full HD". There's also a DMR-BW750 with a 250GB hard drive ($1979).



Panasonic now offers a ridiculous choice of 10 different recording quality modes. Along with DR mode, which offers a perfect copy of the original broadcast, there are now four MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 options for recording high-def content which capture surround sound and let you cram more on the hard drive whilst minimising the loss in picture quality. These MPEG4 modes can also be used to record standard-def, but there are also five other modes designed for standard-def which only record in stereo.

When it comes to DR mode, the BW850 can fit three hours of HD recordings on a single layer 25GB Blu-ray disc or around 30 minutes of high-def content on a single layer DVD. Any more and it opts for a lower quality recording mode. Dual layer Blu-ray and DVD discs are also supported, although the discs are prohibitively expensive. On a single layer DVD, the extra compression is barely noticeable on high-def recordings under 45 minutes, but a two hour high-def movie squashed onto a DVD looks little better than an standard-def recording.

It's probably a better idea to record everything to the hard drive, using DR mode which offers a perfect copy of the original broadcast, and then let the recorder downscale it as required if you're archiving a recording to Blu-ray or DVD. If you've got a big high-def TV, such as our 46 inch, 1080p Sony Bravia, you'll be able to see a slight but tolerable difference even if you go down even one step from DR mode. For standard-def recordings you'd probably draw the line at HE mode, which roughly triples your recording capacity. As for high-def recordings, you'd probably draw the line at HG mode, which only boosts your recording capacity by 10 per cent. Any more compression than that and it defeats the point of watching high-def. Of course if your television is smaller than 46 inches you might get way with more compression.

As a Blu-ray player, the BW850 is now BD Live (Profile 2.0) compatible which means, unlike the first-gen Panasonic Blu-ray recorders, it lets you take advantage of interactive content and internet downloads incorporated into some Blu-ray movies. Panasonic has also added DivX playback (from attached media but not a network drive) as well as VIERA CAST, which lets you access YouTube and Google's Picasa Web Albums via the BW850's onscreen menus.

The remote control includes a dedicated VIERA CAST button which makes it easy to access these features. Similar to the iPhone, the YouTube menu offers you a choice of Featured, Most Viewed and Top Rated clips as well as a Search option with an onscreen keyboard. You can choose which YouTube site you want to access, with the option of "Worldwide" or a choice of 19 countries including Australia.

YouTube clips don't play full screen by default, which is probably for the best. Clips play on the right of the screen with details on the left, and the picture quality is very good for well-produced content. One frustrating quirk is that widescreen YouTube clips are squashed to 4:3. When you switch to the full-screen view they look right (although obviously more pixelated), yet in full screen mode 4:3 content is stretched to widescreen. LG's BD370 You-Tube enabled Blu-ray player suffers from the same problem.

Looking to the rear, the BW850 offers pretty much all the connectors you'd want with HDMI 1.3, 10/100 Ethernet, component, s-video and composite outputs along with coax and optical digital. You can also record from external devices via composite, s-video and DV. Panasonic has ditched the SCART inputs found on the earlier models, which is a shame because they provided a handy way to hook up a Foxtel box.

Movie buffs will enjoy the 1080p, 24 frames per second video playback along with 1080p upscaling on DVDs. There's also 7.1-channel surround sound on Blu-ray movies, with support for Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD audio formats. AVCHD and MPEG-2 video can also be copied to the internal hard drive (via USB, disc or SD card) and then edited before being transferred to Blu-ray or DVD - making it a handy recorder for those looking to transfer HD home movies to Blu-ray. Unfortunately Panasonic uses the BDAV recording format rather than BDMV used by commercial Blu-ray movies, which means compatibility with non-Panasonic Blu-ray players is hit and miss.

When it comes to watching television, the BW850 is, unfortunately, still wanting compared to dedicated Personal Video Recorders such as TiVo, Foxtel's iQ2 and IceTV-powered devices such as Topfield and Beyonwiz PVRs.

Unfortunately Panasonic relies on the hotch-potch Electronic Program Guide embedded in the broadcast signal and it can't search the guide for your favourite shows. Nor can it create a true Season Pass for automatically recording your favourite show each week, regardless of timeslot. The big green button on the Panasonic remote calls up the onscreen TV guide, from which you can select a show to record. You can set a recurring weekly recording, but it will just blindly record the same time slot each week rather than checking the EPG for schedule changes. The "Auto Renewal Recording" option will automatically delete the previous episode as a new one is recorded, which stops your hard drive from filling up, but you don't have the flexibility to specify how many episodes of a series to keep. There's also no option to automatically delete old recordings when the hard drive is full.

Advanced features such as Wishlist recordings according to program title or genre are also lacking. As such, it's not really a "Personal" Video Recorder. Another drawback of opting for the BW850 over a true PVR is that there are no remote scheduling options - you can't schedule a recording via the web or your mobile phone.

Panasonic does have a few tricks up its sleeve, such as the ability to skip forward through the ad breaks in 58 second increments - a feature Australian TiVo users are denied. The Panasonic recorder doesn't always ask for confirmation when you press stop while recording, which is annoying, but it does prevent you from accidentally changing channel whilst time-shifting - a rare feature which should be mandatory on all PVRs.

The BW850 does offer excellent standard and high definition television pictures. Twin HD tuners let you record two shows at once, whilst watching one of them, a previous recording or a disc. You can pause live TV and watch the beginning of a program while still recording the end, but there's no automatic buffer for rewinding live TV. The Panasonic menus, onscreen display and remote control are far less user-friendly than TiVo and you'll need to keep the instruction manual on the coffee table for a while.

The BW850's biggest shortcoming is the whopping $2199 RRP price tag, although obviously you'll find it for cheaper than that. Hopefully the price of future models will drop if competitors such as Sony release Blu-ray recorders in Australia. Meanwhile the BW850 is perhaps a great option for early adopters with deep pockets, but power users would probably prefer the flexibility of a true PVR. For the price of the BW850 you could buy/build a Blu-ray media centre, or else buy a Blu-ray player (or a PS3) and a HD PVR and still have money left to play with. Of course the Blu-ray player/PVR combo means you lose the ability to record to Blu-ray. If you'd settle for recording HDTV to DVD you could consider Panasonic's far cheaper DMR-XW450 (500GB, $1319) or DMR-XW350 (250GB, $1099) HDD/DVD recorders - but of course now you've lost Blu-ray playback as well. 

The fact is that there isn't one off-the-shelf device that offers the best of everything, but Panasonic's DMR-BW850 comes pretty damned close.