Home > Consumer Reviews > Panasonic DMR-EX769EB-K Freeview+ 160GB Hard Disc Drive DVD Recorder 1080p Up Conversion

I owned a Sony SVR S-500, which recorded two programmes at the same time, and was almost £300 when I bought it 2 and a half years ago. It was nothing but trouble and in the first year had both circuit boards replaced.It often started recordings early, so I got 4 minutes of ads and missed the end of a programme. That's when it bothered to record anything at all. Sony didn't even reply to my letters, so I have voted with my feet and gone to Panasonic and- it's brilliant so far.It DOES have a series link, and the only negative so far is that irritating ad box which takes up so much of the guide page.Easy to operate and pretty idiot proof! One of my better buys and a nice piece of kit that I would recommend.

At last a DVD recorder that is easy to use, even the mother in law can use it. You can record on disk or straight onto the hard drive which means not having to buy anymore discs and not having to keep checking whats on what disc.
I would highly recommend this recorder.

I bought this mainly to transfer some old VHS-C camcorder tapes to the digital realm, and this it does extremely well. The unit features noise reduction which is adjustable to three settings, it is not intrusive and does a fine job to cut out some of the noise inherent on old VHS tapes. I used a decent old Sony VHS deck to play back the tapes and piped the output from that via a SCART block and A/V leads (yellow, red, white) to the AV3 input on the front of the Panasonic. The resulting recordings are first saved to the internal hard drive where they can be edited, cut, chaptered, etc before being recorded onto DVD. Editing can be done very precisely on this unit, something which I found to be quite impressive.

The Panasonic is however quite picky about which DVDs it will record to, I had to go and buy some Panasonic DVD-RW discs online but they're not too expensive. Haven't tried any DVD-R discs yet but I would go and buy some Panasonic branded ones just to be on the safe side.

There doesn't appear to be much choice for DVD menus on DVDs you record yourself - just the same layout of squares with a few different coloured backgrounds. OK for basic stuff, but once on DVD it's not too difficult to rip the DVD contents to a computer and drop the footage into your favourite DVD creation software. Note that the Panasonic will not record from a VHS tape or DVD that has protection on it (which many commercial pre-recorded ones do).

My main criticism of this unit is that it's a pretty poor DVD player, this almost seems like an after thought as it's not a patch on my old Pioneer DVD player, the thing I miss most is the memory - the Pioneer DVD player would remember the precise moment that I last stopped a disc and would resume playback from that point even if the disc was removed and the unit shut down (it had memory for quite a few discs too); the Panasonic doesn't remember anything, if a disc is in the unit it will start playing at chapter one, scene one when the unit is switched on in DVD mode, which is annoying if I am on chapter 4, or episode 4 of a series, as I have to stop it, go through the initial main menu animation (which cannot be skipped), scroll to episode 4 and then finally click on play episode. It makes the unit a poor replacement for my old player, I am considering re-instating my old player and using the Panasonic only for recording.

I've given it four stars because of the excellent recording ability this unit has, one star is knocked off for the poor DVD playback features (or lack thereof). If you just watch films all the way through it won't be a problem, likewise if you just want to record Freeview programmes the unit does an admirable job of this too (the HDD previews and menu system for recorded programmes works very well). Also it integrates well with my Panasonic TV and allows me to use another of my HDMI ports instead of SCART, giving me a slightly crisper image from old VHS recordings and such.

Overall a very good unit, let down only by the DVD playback portion.

Just had mine for just over a day, and am very pleased with it, first class picture, and so easy to set up, if anybody is thinking about getting one I would say yes, you wont be sorry.
My only criticism is the very annoying advert on the Electronic Programme Guides, this cuts the screen by about a third which is a pity, "What is Panasonic thinking about?" I would rate this product at 100% but for this annoying addition, so can only rate it at 90%.
Wake up Panasonic, you give us the feature to cut adverts from recordings but slap one in our face as part of your software

I purchased two recorders to replace two Panasonic DMR EZ25EB recoders, If I had brought them one at a time I would never had purchased the second. The Guide has been reduced in size to make way for the very annoying advertisments,as a result the channel numers are no longer shown. It is no longer possible to scroll down the list to the required channel number,each channel name has to be read seperately. This is my only problem with what is otherwise a very good product. What a pity to spoil it for the sake of intrusive advertising.