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,
Best helper for converting DVD movies, 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
Mac DVD Ripper 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 to mpeg, 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 to Ipod 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 to AVI 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,
Creative Zen, 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.