Panasonic DMR-XW440GLK

MOST DISSAPOINTED – After only 17 months my Panasonic DVD/HDD recorder has ceased working - 5 months outside the warranty period. It now displays error code U99 but will not respond to the fix described in the troubleshooting section of the user manual. This recorder was a replacement for my previous Panasonic recorder which also did not last for more that a few years. I would not recommend this product, which is a pity as it is one of only a few that has the twin recording function.

Pleased as Punch! – We’ve had an earlier model of this for years, and it’s been 100% reliable. The only thing we could fault was it wouldn’t record in HD, so when this came up on special at our local store, we decided to upgrade. So glad we did - not only does it have an almost identical remote, so it was quite simple to find our way around, but with an ethernet connection, we now have ABC iView, SBS On Demand, YouTube & Vimeo when I figure it out.

Excellent DVD recorder – I recently purchased the DVD recorder due to 12 year old Panasonic DVD recorder "turning up its toes." In spite of reading negative reports about Panasonic and that I did not require Blu Ray, this unit was available. My TV is a Panasonic and believe that it's more compatible with the same brand. I still record programs from my TV and have lots of DVDs to view from holidays etc.

This unit had negative reports mainly relating to the difficulty of use. Yes it takes time to work out all the instructions for the remote control. Since I had mastered Panasonic with the old version, it was quite simple to transfer my knowledge to the new device. So far It is a good product and "yes" it would be less difficult with a simple and easier Remote Control. The price was right too, very inexpensive.

You can do better than this – I bought this product on the promise that it could record live streaming signal from my TV and happily enough, it does fulfill that requirement. The only problem with it is how it does it and the appalling limitations it displays in so doing. To record something is simple on this machine. However, to get that recording off the machine onto other media is the problem. My requirements are that I want the media to be able to be burnt onto a DVD for a friend living overseas who cannot see this program without it being sent in such fashion.

Therefore, the only way I can do this is by burning it from the Panasonic onto a DVD. The problems with this are:

1. Although the size of the recording is around 1 hour, Panasonic informs me that a 4.4Gb DVD is too small for the job and the burning will have to be compressed. This leaves the size of the image reduced.

2. Although the Panasonic is meant to have LAN capabilities and you can see it on the network from either Windows or Linux and you can see the recording on the machine via Windows or Linux, you cannot copy it across to your PC for editing and there appears to be no copying facility within the Panasonic operating system.

3. The Panasonic operating system itself is most unfriendly. If you use a USB to download the recording, you cannot see it on either Windows or Linux as the USB has been formatted to Panasonic's OS and is thus unreadable to other OS's. .

All in all I think that Panasonic went out of their way to discourage the burning of media from this machine and it makes me wonder why they bothered at all.