Panasonic Blu-ray recorders: much more than meets the eye

After a soft launch in Amsterdam in February, Panasonic has given us a much more in-depth look at its upcoming Blu-ray recorders.

And it turns out that they’re actually much more than just Blu-ray recorders.

As we reported at the time, there will be two models initially: the DMR-BS850, and DMR-BS750. And we can now confirm that the only difference between them when they launch towards the end of June will be that the BS850 will have 500GB of built in HDD memory versus the BS750's 250GB.

Two tuners are better than one

Impressively, both units carry twin Freesat tuners as standard, meaning that you can record two different Freesat channels at the same time.

And both decks come fully compatible with the increasingly impressive Freesat electronic programme guide, which really does make recording very easy thanks to features such as series link, split programme recording, and the ability to react to schedule updates.

The recorders both store broadcasts initially on their built-in HDDs, recording the direct digital bit-streams so that there’s absolutely no loss of quality between the original broadcasts and the recordings.

But when you write them to Blu-ray disc, you get a selection of different recording quality options. Using the highest quality ‘DR’ recording mode, you can store up to 77 hours of HD onto the BS850’s 500GB HDD, or 7.5 hours of HD onto a 50GB Blu-ray disc.

Or if you go for the lowest recording settings, you can fit 240 hours onto the 500GB HDD, or a stonking 24 hours onto a 50GB Blu-ray disc.

More HD, less storage space

What’s particularly interesting about this is that the lowest quality mode still records HD, and from what we saw today, pretty decent quality HD at that, thanks to Panasonic’s proprietary video compression techniques.

It also came as a major relief to learn that Freesat has decided, for now at least, to place no recording limitations on its broadcasts at all.

In other words, although the recorders have the capability to limit how many Blu-ray recordings you can make of broadcasts, depending on the broadcasters’ wishes, as things stand right now you’ll be able to make recordings of Freesat broadcasts – even HD ones – as many times as you like.

Another unexpected but very welcome aspect of both the new recorders is their multimedia savviness. Particularly excellent in our book is the way the recorders let you store your HD camcorder footage onto Blu-ray without any need for any PC intervention.

You just plug in the camcorder or an SD card with camcorder footage on it (in the AVCHD format), and you can transfer your movies – with remarkable speed – to the decks’ HDD and Blu-ray recording sections, with the recorders able to convert the incoming footage so that they’re compatible with Blu-ray playback.

Cutting out the PC middle man

The deck can also take in and store JPEGs to their HDDs or Blu-rays, finally offering a simple way for you to archive all those data-intensive HD video and photos that are probably clogging up your PCs as we speak.

As if all the stuff we’ve covered so far wasn’t enough, the BS850 and BS750 both carry Panasonic’s new Viera Cast technology, allowing you to go online into Panasonic’s ring-fenced internet world, which currently comprises access to YouTube videos, and the Picasa online photo album service.

The new recorder decks also love playing discs back as much as they like recording stuff. For they each carry all the picture processing technology for Blu-ray playback that’s won Panasonic's standalone Blu-ray players universal critical acclaim.

A Blu-ray recorder don't come for free

We suspect that many of you will probably already be gagging to get your hands on Panny’s new Blu-ray babies. So it’s probably about time I revealed that neither the BS850 nor BS750 are exactly going to be cheap: We’re hearing £899 for the BS750, and £999 for the BS850.

As an interesting sidenote to the main Blu-ray event, Panasonic also announced today the launch of a separate HDD/DVD Freesat recorder, the DMR-XS350, that can record HD and standard def Freesat broadcasts to its HDD – though obviously you can only archive to DVD in standard definition.