Two-and-a-half years ago, Stephen Dawson was impressed with Panasonic’s then top-of-the-line Blu-ray disc recorder. Now the newest version has more hard disk, more tuners, more capabilities and a price reduction of more than $300.

At its most basic, the Panasonic DMR-BWT945 is a combined free-to-air personal video recorder (PVR) and DVD/Blu-ray player. And DVD/Blu-ray recorder; the unit is capable of burning recordable and re-writable Blu-ray discs and DVDs. It is also a DLNA-compatible server for music, photos and videos on its hard disk, and a DLNA-compatible media renderer (i.e. playback device) for music, photos and videos on your network.

It has three tuners to allow you to record three things at once. You may not want to do such a thing, but multiple tuners allows overlapping recordings, especially if you use the recording ‘buffers’, which allow all recordings to start early and finish later to ensure you catch the whole thing. (One complaint: the maximum tail-end buffer is only 10 minutes, which isn’t always sufficient in my experience to guarantee the capture of all laggard programmes.)

To hold all those recordings it is fitted with a 2TB hard disk drive. Panasonic boasts that it has sufficient space for 1,370 hours of HD recording. I make it about 500 hours of ABC News 24, 400 of SBS HD, maybe 550 hours of GEM. It turns out that Panasonic is talking about recording HD TV in the recorder’s ‘HM’ mode, which is the most highly compressed HD conversion mode it offers. In general, unless you have needs beyond fitting a couple of hundred HD movies on your recorder, it’s best to use ‘DR’ mode, which simply captures the original broadcast video without any conversion.

In addition to DLNA, the unit offers a range of internet services, plus Miracast connectivity to allow wireless streaming from certain Android devices. WiFi direct is supported for those lacking a WiFi network.

Setting Up
The recorder starts up first time with a wizard that quickly takes you through tuning in TV stations, followed by the network. It found the two versions of SBS available in my area, automatically abandoning the weaker version and retaining the stronger one. The network includes WiFi in both 2.4 and 5GHz bands.

As usual with Panasonic Blu-ray players and recorders, you will need to make one manual setting: go to Setup/Basic Settings/Connections/HDMI Connection and set ‘24p Output’ to ‘Automatic’ rather than the default of ‘Off’, otherwise your 24p Blu-ray discs will suffer from jerky on-screen movement.

For playing SD cards you’ll need to open the front flap, likewise if you want to use the front USB socket. There’s also one at the rear.

TV
For a long time Panasonic has produced the best looking SD and HD TV picture available, well ahead of any other PVRs. The others have been closing the gap over the years to where they perhaps match it in some respects, but no more than that.

In particular, the progressive scan conversion of the unit is excellent. In automatic mode it works extremely well, but you can also force it to video or film mode for certain performance. Short of some amazing DSP-revolution, I don’t think it’s possible to deliver a better picture quality.

The unit supports Freeview Plus! The EPG and catchup EPG for previous days are available for those stations which support them (primarily ABC and SBS out here in the regions).

There is a highly useful series record function available, called ‘Keyword Recording’. Go to the EPG, select a program and press the blue key, and a panel comes up allowing you to determine the criteria you want to use. If you do that on Homeland, for example, the panel will show that as the search criterion, but you can edit it, have only the program name taken into account or also the information about the program (so you can automatically record all Cary Grant movies, for example), add further search terms, restrict it to a particular genre, and limit the channels used (by setting up favourite channel lists). If you prefer, you can go into ‘Keyword Recording’ clean and set one up without relying on existing EPG entries.

The EPG is an eight day one, so if it’s Monday and the TV station is broadcasting sufficient EPG information, you go jump forward to next Monday’s entries to set up new recordings. Ideal when a promo comes up at the end of a program for next week’s replacement program, or for the next intriguing episode.

There are a number of limitations imposed on operation while you’re recording. Network functions, for example, are locked out, as is access to the Setup menu. So while you might want to think of the unit as your all in one source device, you may find yourself unable to do what you want to do at any particular time.

Burning
Once you’ve recorded something you can edit out the advertisements. If it’s HD and you are interested in economy rather than quality you can convert to SD for burning to DVD. How quickly the burning takes place is highly variable, depending on the original recording mode you chose and the mode you’ve chosen for burning. It can range from a few 10 of minutes to fill a disc up to rather longer than real time playback. If you stick with DR mode, quality can be identical to that originally broadcast. You can also use the unit to burn full HD AVCHD video that you’ve recorded on a camcorder to Blu-ray.

New Media
Rather to my surprise, I found that this unit supports 4K output for photos. Most Blu-ray players that offer 4K output convert photos down to 1080p resolution before scaling back up to 4K. This unit will yield quite a bit more detail than you’d typically get from other players. The unit switches automatically to 4K for photos if your TV supports 4K.

Not to say it was perfect. The signal for whatever reason to my LG 4K TV was clearly using 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, so colour was one quarter of the resolution of the luminance. Except for my weird test patterns, this is unlikely to be obvious in still images viewed on the TV.

While on the subject of 4K, the unit would not support any 4K video from USB or SD, neither the various clips I’ve accumulated, nor even 4K video shot on a Panasonic GH4 camera. The only moving 4K you’ll get from this unit is material upscaled from SD or HD.

As a DLNA Renderer I was able to select it in an app on an Android device and direct music and video from my NAS to it. The music worked well, with support of MP3 and FLAC files, the latter all the way up to 24 bit, 192kHz. As a DLNA server it worked in reverse. The best way to work this is to install the ‘DIGA Player’ app on an Android or iOS device. You can then, while connected to the network, dial up the player and select either a TV station of one of the recordings for playback on your device. This won’t interfere with whatever TV station is showing on the connected TV.

The unit supports Panasonic’s suite of internet access apps, providing by default Quickflix, YouTube, Bigpond Movies, a web browser, AFL Game Analyser and some catchup services. There are also social media interfaces, games and lots of other things to choose from.

Control
As usual with Panasonic recorders, there are some irritating operational issues, mostly related to the remote. There’s no remote app available. The supplied remote has several prominent keys that will pull you out of Blu-ray playback to TV mode without requesting confirmation. If the disc has some BD-Java on it, that means losing your place in playback. You soon learn to think twice before pressing a key on the remote.

The eject key (on the unit, there isn’t one on the remote) does nothing while the unit is establishing a HDMI connection following a video format change, something which happens a lot, and left me punching the key repeatedly trying to change discs.

Conclusion
Still, there is no higher quality way to watch TV and record massive quantities of it than the Panasonic DMR-BWT945. It saves you space nicely by including disc playback, and you can archive stuff to disc. The lower price now has it verging on affordability. This is one fine machine.