Panasonic DMR-EX773EBK Multi Format DVD Recorder & 160GB HDD Hard Drive Recorder, With Freeview+ and HDMI 1080P, USB

this is my 3rd pansonic dvd recorder and i am very happy with it...i am a fan of panasonic products and this recorder is of good quality,this my view of the recorder first of all it is smaller and lighter than the non hd model,i found the small inprovements in the design of the player to be nice,the old non hd model has the eject switch near the record button ,but this new model has the eject on the top right.the the player is not very difficult to use ,but just follow the on screen titles and you should be fine,i brought the recorder to record from tv while i watch, so i dont know much about the timer,i was able to record from my dvd ram disk to the hd as soon i recieved the player,just follow the on screen menu,i think that some of the other reviews are harsh in saying the player is slow ,i dont think it is,it does take about 2 seconds to start recordingbut all the pansn dvd recorders i have do....let me finish the review in saying is the pans dvd recorder is good quality recorder and one of the best on the market so i give it 5 stars.

I bought this to replace a Sony recorder which had no Freeview, and because a recently bought Panasonic TV seemed to have much better reception in our marginal area than the (very expensive) Sony set-top box.It's grindingly slow in pretty much everything it does, but it produces much better pictures than the (5+ years old) Sony. If you record in highest quality to the hard drive, when you copy to your DVD, if it doesn't fit, instead of choosing an arbtirary recording mode (SP 2 hours, LP 3 hours etc) it compresses your files just enough to fit exactly onto the disc ("flexible recording") so you always get the best possible pictures. The algorithms are much improved too: I squeezed the whole of "Reds", a film lasting well over 3 hours, on to a single DVD-R and there wasn't a trace of mpeg2 artifact.Reception a definite improvement on the old STB.Pause live TV excellent.There are a few personal irritations most of which are pretty trivial and relate to the software.Slow reaction to every button press I have already mentioned, advertising panel on program guide noted by others.No intelligent chaptering! Hasn't this been standard for ages?Be careful with weekly timer recordings - it can't cope with these unless they start at the same time each week.Listing recordings on the hard drive: poor selection of information. Tells you to the nearest minute when each recording was made, and even the day of the week, but no duration or size of the file. (Actually, I don't think the word "Gigbytes" apprears in any menu or display).Every time you make the list or return to the listing screen after doing something, it insists on playing the currently selected recording in a little window, including sound, from the beginning. In an unedited recording this is usually a bit of banal dialogue from a BBC employee and becomes excruciatingly irritating when heard for the 20th time. (If it won't let you switch this off, at least put a TV mute button on the remote!)Editing: I spend quite a lot of time removing adverts and think I will grow to like the available buttons (which include chapter +/-5mins; buttons for +1min and -10 secs; "joystick" for frame-by-frame) but remote design could be improved: the buttons are all different sizes and arbitrarily placed. When doing a repetitive job like this you don't want to have to keep looking at your fingers.Can't do anything else when copying. I don't know if it would be possible to release the freeview tuner just by revising the software.If you set the machine to switch itself off after copying, it will crash, and you will have to disconnect the power and reboot. As a matter of fact it has minor crashes from time to time which together with the slow response times (and a few other trivial irritations and malfunctions which I can't remember) suggests that the software is pretty ropey, possibly because it's new. No software updates yet, but when these arrive they should make this fine machine even better.(March 2011) 9 months on and no sign that the creaky software has been updated. It has now several times failed to produce a proper DVD - the disk has no chapters and is not and cannot be finalised so can't be used in any other machine and is to all intents useless. (If this happens to you, you must switch the machine on and off at the mains or it will just do it again.)I suspect the Sony equivalent might be better.

We bought a reconditioned unit, very good price but after that it all went downhill. The manual is extensive, but so bulky it becomes exasperating to find the answers required. The software on this device is very crude, and the chip is inordinately slow. Boot up and shut down are very slow. Unlike the rest of the system it seemed unable to get a signal from the aerial, so I bought a new and expensive bigger one and that worked better. Sadly the aded cost knocked the original bargain price into the rough. The recordings went well although it did cut the end off one for reasons unknown. However the unit started the "action failed, press OK to cycle power" rubbish each time we turned it on. Back to Amazon it goes (thanks to them for their no messing approach to returns). Thanks also to all the other reviewers who, while varied in their appreciation of the machine, spent time for my benefit. We have had a lot of machines fail over the last few years, all made in China, including VCR recorders, Digi-boxes DVD players and recorders and now HDD recorders. I'll be looking for a 5 year guarantee on the next. Question is, does anybody make anything reliable now? I've had it up to here with cheap c***p. Cheap isn't enough, it has to work too.

I use this DVD recorder to record from Freeview, and from two satellite TV receivers. My previous DVD recorder had analogue tuning while this recorder only has digital tuning. Although my TV receiver has both analogue and digital tuning it has only two scart inputs. In order to conveniently record from the two satellite TV receivers it was therefore necessary to install additional scart switching but this has worked out very well. The quality of the recordings is excellent and the transfer of recordings from the HDD to DVD disks works well. Unlike my previous DVD recorder, if the recording exceeds the basic capacity of the DVD disk,instead of having to transfer the excess to a second disk, this recorder compresses the recording automatically to fit a standard disk. This process takes much longer than the 'fast copy' process but avoids the need for this to be done later on a computer. It took some time for me to become familiar with the main features of this recorder in the 96 page A4 size instruction book.The terminology used to describe some of the functions is a little strange but, having now become familiar with this, I am delighted with this high quality recorder and the many sophisticated functions built into it.