Home > Consumer Reviews > Panasonic DMR-BS750EBK Twin Freesat Tuners 250GB HDD Blu-ray Recorder

I bought the panasonic blu-ray recorder to be able to put my HD recordings off my panasonic HD video camera,all together on one blu-ray disc in HD format instead of several DVD discs & it does that brilliantly.I know it is an expensive item but Amazon gave me a good saving & delivered promptly.If you appreciate quality it is worth the money.

The quality is excellent. If anything it does more than I had expected when i bought it.

My biggest problem is that the instruction booklet appears incomplete and/or the instructions are counter intuitive. Even after six weeks I don't fully understand why I can and can't upload music and pictures.And, although there is a button so I can see my pictures by album rather than date, nothing happens when I press the button.

However, what is really irritating is that I can't find a helpline or web help pages. S I am reduced to guessing how things might work and then guessing again when they don't

So far I'm impressed with this box. The Freesat+ (series link) function works well, if you select a program from the guide that is also available in HD it asks if you want to record the HD version. You can record two channels while watching a disc. You can copy from the internal hard drive to blu-ray or DVD with ease. If you're copying to blu-ray it is very fast. There is also the ability to record at a lower quality, i.e. re-encode the video. This is done in "real-time" so it takes a while. There do seem to be, what I think, are omissions. There doesn't seem to be the option to copy video from the hard drive to a USB stick or SD card.

Setting the unit up was very easy and quick.

Video quality seems excellent, though I've only used the HDMI connection, so can't comment on the other outputs (SACRT, component and S-Video).

Start-up of blu-ray discs isn't that fast, but I'd say it's on a par with other blu-ray players I've seen. What is slow, is the length of time it takes to power on, and response to the remote is a little slugish.

The only down sides to this unit are the slightly confusing array of recording modes (they are: DR, HG, HX, HE, HL, XP, SP, LP, EP, FR) and the disc types supported for recording (they are: BD-RE, BD-R, BD-RE DL, BD-R DL, DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-R DL, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+R DL, DVD+RW) and the combinations of allowed recording modes and disc types.

It is worth mentioning that the HD transmissions from ITV and BBC are copy protected. Depending on what has been encoded, it may be possible to only copy a recording from HD to disc once, or not at all in HD quality. Copies in SD seem to not be limited.

This is quite an expensive unit, but considering how many other boxes to does away with, I think it's worth it.