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Hi All,
There are not many reviews about this unit so I will start mine to help others, as I bought it on Saturday.
We can't even get Freeview HD yet, not until June but this was an ex display unit at Comet so price was reduced to £149.99 I thought that's good price for a Panasonic HD PVR so why wait until June. Couldn't go wrong at this price so I bought it anyway.
Set up was easy, it took a few minutes to tune in, obviously no Freeview HD yet so I can't make comment about HD picture quality but other Freeview channels looked alright.
Good points;
- It is very very quiet as expected from Panasonic quality.
- can play a DIVX movie from USB
- TV guide has the option for single channel view in Portrait as well as multiple channels in Landscape
- Manual skip button for adverts 60 seconds skip or 10 second back.
- Setting HDMI to automatic upscales picture to 1080p if your TV is full HD.
- You can edit and partial delete of recorded programmes.
Bad points
- Big blank DIGA advert takes about 30% of Guide screen. It is useless and should not be there. There should be an option full screen EPG guide.
- Pressing guide means losing the picture & sound of whatever you are watching!
- There is no schedule button, so to see what is in timer recording you need to press Function menu then go down to timer recordings. That's 4 button pressing! You only need to press once on my Topfield PVR.
- If you are watching a recorded programme you can't see any detail of the programme. Pressing info button just confirms how many minutes have been watched and how long left.
- Now the worse part. You can't play your DIVX movie when timer recording starts! Considering most people would record something on prime time slot between 8pm to 10pm while watching their DIVX movies this is bad limitation.
To test this I started watching a DIVX movie 5 minutes before the timer recording and when it kicked off, the message popped up saying can't play back USB media when recording.
You would expect to watch your DIVX movie while it is recording, if you have a Panasonic DVD recorder you can watch a DVD while recording Freeview channels so why can't we watch USB media while this unit records?
Doesn't make sense to me.
Luckily, I have a Sony Bravia TV with USB media so I used Sony to play my DIXV movie while Panasonic was recording but if your TV doesn't offer this you may be disappointed with this limitation.
- You can't seem to edit manual ad skip button to from 60 seconds to 4 minutes like other PVRs, so again 4 button pressing required.
I have Sony set up for BBC Iplayer so I didn't need to set Panasonic for this, so can't make comment on BBCI Player.
I am sure there are many more good or bad points, I will update as I learn them feel free to ask a question if you wish to.
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