Panasonic DMR-BWT800 review

A/V racks filled with high-end equipment might look impressive, but they take up a lot of room, tend to be power-hungry and create a surprising amount of heat. If you want to simplify your home cinema setup, Panasonic’s DMR-BWT800EB all-in-one system might be exactly what you’re looking for. Combining a 3D Blu-ray player and recorder, DLNA media streamer, twin Freeview HD tuners and a 500GB hard disk, it’s got so many features you could be forgiven for thinking it was a home theatre PC in disguise.

Despite packing in so much technology, the unit itself is understated and looks refreshingly minimalist. The entire front panel folds out when you eject the disc tray, revealing a USB port and SD card reader that can be used to play multimedia files from a flash drive or SDXC card. Around the back two HDMI ports, two SCART sockets, RGB video, optical and coaxial audio outputs and an Ethernet port sit beside a second USB port for Panasonic’s Skype camera, which lets you make video calls from your sofa.

The unit has built-in Wi-Fi, so you can connect to your home network easily without needing to run a cable to your router. This makes streaming multimedia files from a PC or DLNA-compatible server much easier, saving you the time it takes to copy files onto removable storage. Once connected to the internet, you’ll also be able to access the integrated VIERA Cast internet TV features to play YouTube videos, access social networks, watch movies on-demand and catch up on missed TV using BBC iPlayer.

Catch-up TV is a great feature, but there’s a good chance you won’t miss any programs in the first place, thanks to the built-in hard disk recorder. A respectable 500GB capacity should be more than large enough for around a hundred hours of standard definition video; high-definition footage will obviously take up more space, but there should still be room for multiple films and TV series. Once you’ve filled the internal hard disk, the Blu-ray optical drive can also be used to burn content to disc, freeing up internal storage and providing a permanent copy of your programmes. You can also record 3D content, although as there currently aren’t any 3D channels available on Freeview HD, this isn’t a feature we can see appealing to many. Once we’d copied a TV program from the hard disk to a BD-R disc, we couldn’t get it to play on a PC; you’ll need to play back recordings using the player itself.

Unlike Samsung’s D8500M (see What’s New, Shopper 282), the BWT800 has two separate TV tuners, so you can record two programs at once or record one while time-shifting live TV on the other. There’s a slight delay when activating time shift, but otherwise, it works very well. A sensibly laid-out recording menu notifies you of any conflicts and warns you if you’re trying to change channels when two are already recording.

Standard definition television broadcasts were reasonably clear, but some of the lower quality channels suffered from noise artefacts. Thankfully, high definition content was almost completely free of noise, both on free-to-air television and Blu-ray. 3D playback was just as smooth as regular Blu-ray content, although the quality of the effect will depend on the 3DTV you connect the player to.

In spite of all these excellent features, we weren’t impressed with the on-screen interface. It isn’t the most attractive interface to begin with, despite being less cluttered than those of other set-top boxes we’ve seen, but the confusing remote control and context-sensitive buttons made it difficult to use some of the more advanced features without reaching for the instruction manual. Things improve with time, but it’s still initially frustrating. The TV guide, in particular, fills the entire screen but has no on-screen preview and cuts all sound, so you can’t choose another program without missing out on what you were watching originally. Picture quality options were quite sparse, leaving most of the image processing to your TV, but you are able to control noise reduction and enable or disable upscaling of standard-definition content through the player itself.

We were quite impressed with the BWT800; it has every feature we would hope to see in a Blu-ray player, plus PVR functions and internet TV. Although recording 3D content isn’t quite as important as Panasonic would have you believe, the ability to record to Blu-ray is great for anyone that likes to archive their TV programs but it certainly adds to the BWT800’s steep price. User interface aside it’s an impressive all-in-one system, but bear in mind that there are better separates available for less.