Review With a built-in Blu-ray recorder and dual Freeview HD tuners, Panasonic’s DMR-BW880 is something of a novelty among Freeview+ DVRs. Other tasty nuggets include a 500GB hard disk, the VieraCast Internet video portal, DLNA networking, Gracenote CD database access and playback of many common audio and video formats. Along with its little bro, the DMR-BW780, this is arguably the most advanced video recorder you can treat your living room to.

Optical resolution? Panasonic's DMR-BW880

Not surprisingly, it takes some time to familiarise yourself with the BW880. I took the plug ’n’ play approach without recourse to the encyclopædic 120-page instruction manual and happily watched the machine tuning itself in. After setting preferences such as power saving settings and testing the network, I was quickly able to jump to the HD channels from the channel list. No extra info here, such as programme description, but scrolling up and down and selecting is reassuringly fast.

Overall, for such a complex beast, both the menu system and remote control are well designed in terms of their layout and I wasn’t left feeling that any vital buttons are missing from the remote. The ability to quickly switch drives using one button is vital with HDD, BD, USB and SD options at your disposal.

I can forgive the remote for looking a tad boring - functionality takes precedence - but Panasonic’s dated looking UI badly needs overhauling. It reminds me of a 10-year-old Pioneer DVD recorder that looked 10 years out of date at the time.

A rather ancient looking remote is rather at odds with the rest of what's on offer

Worse even than the dated look is the GuidePlus+ sponsored Freeview EPG. Not only does it exit the picture and sound of the current broadcast but valuable real estate is given over to the most amateur-looking poster adverts for a handful of companies. More positively, you can switch between list and grid view with seven channels shown in two-hour segments. You can filter by genre but not by definition type and you directly view the channel or set a recording timer including series link.

Recording management is excellent. It’s really easy to manually pad out the recording or change the name of the show. When watching a live TV show the banner info shows Now and Next descriptions, whether it’s HD or not, what the audio format is and what if anything is being recorded at that time.

Setup Menu

All TV shows are recorded in DR (direct record) mode using the same bit-rate (8Mbps for HD) as the original, to the hard disk and the 500GB disk has a 130hr HD capacity. Freeview HD audio is output as PCM with no Dolby Digital available from the digital optical output.

To view or copy a recording to Blu-ray or DVD you press the Function Menu. There are several handy editing options such as chapter marking, splitting, changing the thumbnail and renaming. With a blank disc inserted and formatted it’s fairly straightforward to select titles for copying.

You can only make one HD copy of ITV and C4 shows but there’s no limitation with BBC material. A handy icon flags up those shows with limited copying. One flaw is that if choosing from within a series-link folder, any other selected titles have to be re-selected – very odd.

Panasonic’s fledgling VieraCast service just dips a toe in the lukewarm Internet video waters. You can’t access it when the hard disk is recording, which is no great loss. Curiously, whilst the DMR-BW880 is DLNA compliant it can’t access media files on a PC, but it can act as a remote read-only drive for a PC and you can store up to 40,000 MP3 albums. Navigation is comprehensively iPod-style with artist, album, favourites, playlists and frequently-played folders. You can also copy AVCHD, JPEGs and DiVx (including HD) files to the HDD.

The HD Freeview tuner is excellent, with as much clarity and detail as I’ve seen on any broadcast platform, whilst standard def pics are also top-rate. Image quality however does drop-off just a tiny smidgen with recordings.

Comprehensive interfacing enables integration with any typical home setup

Viewing on a rather splendid Samsung UE46C8000 backlit LED TV, I noticed the skin on some of ITV’s Loose Women wasn’t looser but it was blotchier and the all-orange shirts of Holland’s footballers lost a bit of detail where Sky HD managed to retain all of the original detail. Happily, no more detail was lost on the journey on to Blu-ray.

As a Blu-ray player, the DMR-BW880 performs perfectly well. It’s not the fastest deck in town at loading discs but navigation is fine and image and sound quality are well up to snuff with Avatar serving up some fantastically detailed pictures. Multi-media playback is not as broad as some machines with only FAT16 and FAT32 formats acceptable on USB, but MP3 and DiVx played back faultlessly.

Verdict

The Panasonic DMR-BW880 makes watching, recording, editing and archiving HD extremely straightforward. It also an accomplished Blu-ray deck and has fairly decent networking capabilities too. Yet despite these capabilities it falls short with its jaded looking menus and an annoying Freeview EPG. After all, you really shouldn’t have advertisements foisted upon you when you’re paying this kind of price and hence the overall rating it receives here suffers because of that. ®

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