Panasonic DMR-BS850 Freesat HD Blu-ray Disc Recorder with Hard Drive

The Panasonic DMR-BS850 is very similar to the units smaller brother, the Panasonic DMR-BS750, but gives you a much bigger hard disk at 500Gb over the 750’s 250Gb, meaning that your recording potential is double and you should be able to squeeze 80 hours of high-definition programmes or 200 hours of standard definition programmes onto the disk.

As the Panasonic DMR-BD850 is a Freesat+ personal video recorder (PVR) it does of course allows you to watch and record Freesat HD television as well as pause and rewind live programmes. When you’ve watched the programmes you can delete them from the hard disk to make space, or, and this is the main difference with the Panasonic DMR-BD850 over other PVR’s, you can record them onto a Blu-ray disc using the built in Blu-ray disc recorder.

The DMRBS850 is the top of the range HD recorder from Panasonic and this is reflected in the rather hefty price tag. However, if you try and buy a Blu-ray player (such as the Panasonic DMP-BD80 or Sony BDP-S560) and Freesat HD Recorder (Humax Foxsat HDR) separately you’ll still be looking at a substantial sum, and that’s without the Blu-ray recorder. And this is probably the biggest point to consider when you’re looking at the DMR-BD850 – if you don’t need the Blu-ray disc recorder then you can probably save some money and buy separate boxes at a cheaper price, but you won’t get the ease of use and set up that you get with an all in one player.

The Panasonic 850 is a very capable 1080p Blu-ray player and offers the latest Blu-ray profile, BD-Live, to give you all the bonus features you get with Blu-ray. Like the BD750 the BD850 also has the Gracenote built-in music database so you can use the player as a Jukebox and is even more useful with the bigger hard drive.