Panasonic DMR-E500H

Posted by T3 Online on Wed 31 Oct 2007

Kiss goodbye to outdoor activities with this beast

The average person watches five hours of television a day. That means if you buy this DVD/hard disk recorder, you'll be able to fit 20 weeks of viewing on its 400GB hard drive. Imagine what you could do instead with all that time - take up mountain biking, learn to tango, write a novel, travel round the world... Then again, imagine all the weird and wonderful programmes you could fit on the E500 and dip into at your leisure. No contest, surely.

Considering the amount of storage and features on offer, Panasonic has done a fairly decent job of keeping the front of the model stylish. Around the back, an impressive collection of sockets is made more interesting by the inclusion of an Ethernet port. This signals yet another first in this machine's repertoire. Besides having the biggest hard drive, and being the first recorder to offer DVD-Audio - like anyone gives a damn - it's the first to boast home networking.

There are two types of network you can create, the first of which is between the recorder and a PC (but not a Mac). The facility is impressive as a sign of intent, but limited at the moment - you can only use the PC to view still photos or low- quality MPEG-4 clips stored on the Panny. What we'd really like to have seen is the ability to play your PC's videos on your TV, as with Philips' MX6000i (T3 104, 4/5).

The other networking option is to take two recorders, run an Ethernet cable between them and use one to access video, music and photos on the other. Although this works well, what's really dumb is that it makes the unit being accessed unusable, so the whole feature is a bit redundant.

Moving on to the nuts and bolts, recordings are first-rate, with those made in the 89- and 177-hour hard drive modes proving indistinguishable from TV broadcasts. Dubbing from the hard disk to DVD-RAM or DVD-R is also simple, with speeds of up to 64x on offer. The image quality obviously depends on how much space you need on the disc, but using the flexible recording mode, we managed to transfer two hours of footage to DVD-R with fantastic results. Set-up and ease of use are excellent throughout.

Despite the crap networking, this is still the ultimate digital video recorder if you don't want Sky. It ain't cheap, but it's a dream to use, and right now there isn't anything to match it.

FEATURES
400GB hard disk (709 hours' maximum recording). Records to DVD-RAM and DVD-R. Plays MP3, WMA, JPEG and some MPEG-4 CDs. Ethernet networking feature (PC only).