Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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104 of 106 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent but an opportunity missed Mr Panasonic., 19 Oct 2008
It will help you to know that I also have a very similar DMR-E95H (the old flagship) which I have used a lot for the last 4 years. The E95H is now starting to give problems (it appears that the hard disk is very hesitant to start) but it has been extremely useful and I did not hesitate to get another Panasonic machine - even though they share the same drawbacks!
The E95H picture is good but the DMR EX88 picture is better in virtually every respect. One very minor quibble is that when viewing my TV (Viera TX32LXD1) via the DMR-EX88's tuner, the picture looks perfect until you do an A to B comparison with the TV's own tuner. If you do that you can see that there is an artificial smoothness introduced by the EX88. You lose a small element of fine 'texture' so that skin looks smoother than it is on the TV's own tuner. It is as if the EX88 has a filter of some sort which has 'decided' that the skin texture is 'noise' - so it has cut it out.
Don't misunderstand me, the picture via the EX88's tuner looks incredibly sharp, it just loses a little something in the extra processing but you would never normally look that carefully. Without doing that A to B comparison I would probably consider it 'perfect'. It actually looks sharper than the Viera's own tuner but that may be an illusion brought about by the 'noise' reduction in much the same way that a cartoon image always looks sharp on LCD screens. Presumably because there is no subtlety in the image. It is the subtlety that can reveal an LCD screen's dot-crawl shortcomings. On the other hand, maybe the 'diagonal recognition software' in the EX88 is actually making it sharper - difficult to tell. If you have ever done your own photographic developing you may be aware of the 'edge enhancement' of some Black and White developers. The sharpness I am seeing on screen seems similar to that.
The HDD recorded images are again excellent and noticeably better than the E95H. With a decent screen it is well worth using the highest quality recording mode (XP) all the time, everything else is a compromise and with a 400GB hard-drive I see little point in compromising. Despite what you may read elsewhere the image is not quite as good as live TV but it is certainly very close and vastly better than the best VHS. If you have not made the change from VHS yet, you are in for a treat!
The DMR EX88 produces truly stunning images from DVD. As good as any high end DVD player that I have seen. You need to look very closely to realise that it is not an HD image, the up-scaling is presumably responsible for this. I put in a Lord of the Rings DVD to test it and had difficulty tearing myself away from the fabulous New Zealand scenery - as well as the story. I will probably watch the whole trilogy again!
I have no idea if I will use the music and picture storing facilities much but I have copied quite of lot of both from memory sticks which is extremely quick and easy. It could quite feasibly be used as a high quality juke box but why on earth have they restricted it to copying MP3 tracks only? I seem particularly sensitive to the failings of MP3 and I would far rather a lossless format was available - WMA lossless for example or FLAC which I use in other machines or even WAV as there is plenty of space on the hard drive. Bad mark for that one. Good marks though for the audio output which seems flawless. I was only listening through a Panasonic SAXR50 AV amp and Denon surround speakers, which is not the best set up I have ever heard, but I detected nothing to warn that it would not be a good music source worthy of playing through a decent Hi Fi set up. If I get around to trying that I will try to update this review.
I was disappointed with the quality of the photograph images that I copied on to the hard drive. I have not worked out why they did not look good yet but they certainly did not look as good as when viewing them on a computer screen. It is potentially useful to be able to put it into a slideshow mode to show your pictures on the TV but I will probably still use my laptop if I want to show anyone my pictures.
A major failing is that Panasonic still only give you one tuner. If you are recording something and want to set it up to record something else, tough! Believe me, that is a really common situation and it would be so easy for Panasonic to get around it. You can't even look at the programme guide whilst it is recording and that borders on pathetic! Come on Panasonic, you know it is not good enough and we would all be happy enough to pay you the extra £0.50 that it would cost to install that second tuner! I bet the Japanese consumers get 2 tuners!
When you can manage to look at the programme guide 25% of the screen width is taken up by adverts. This makes the actual area of screen where you can see the forthcoming programmes rather small and therefore fiddly and slow to use. This is a very bad idea! Other manufacturers manage to provide the guide screen without adverts so why can't Panasonic? Very poor and annoying!
Hopefully it is just a minor failing but the HDD picture does not seem to be as reliable as it is in my ageing E95H. With the EX88 there is an occasional picture break down into coarse pixilation. It only happens for half a second now and again so it is not particularly annoying - but it does happen! That never happened in the E95H. I hope it is not the start of a significant fault but it does not seem to be getting any worse.
Bearing in mind that we are talking about a high end product, it is annoying that you can not get information out of the machine except by burning a DVD. Why on earth not? It has a USB connector - in only, a fire wire connector - in only, an SD card slot - in only. Why? I would like to be able to copy the video files on to a USB stick and play them on my laptop elsewhere. I would like to be able to store my home movies on the HDD and later copy them on to my computer for proper editing without having to burn a DVD to do so. I want to transfer the stored music to a portable player. I want to record a play from Freeview Radio 4 and output an audio file to my portable player - even in MP3 format if I must. I'd even welcome the VOB file that it uses to save video but no, Panasonic have decided we can't have any useful facilities like those. Why for goodness sake? Presumably it is some nonsensical copy protection policy. If so, they should leave the legalities to us consumers and busy themselves with making a useful machine.
A potentially useful new feature (new to me that is) is that it can play DivX files so you do at least have a way of watching other formats if you can get them on to a memory stick. It is very easy and the quality is pretty good but you can't save them to the hard drive, you can only watch them from the 'stick'. Again - why? It really can't be that difficult for Panasonic to come up with the software to play both VOB and DivX or any other format for that matter. I'm sure many a geek can tell them how to do it.
One feature I was really looking forward to is the 1 second start up time advertised by Panasonic. I never timed the E95H but it is probably around 40 seconds to start up, by which time you have missed the bit you wanted to record. So, I can now start the machine recording in 1 second, can I? Errrr NO! What Panasonic don't tell you is that to have the facility to record within 1 second you have to put the machine into a snooze mode. If you do this it will indeed start up, as advertised, within 1 second BUT, BUT, BUT that means you have to leave it in snooze mode all the time consuming 15 watts instead of the more reasonable standby consumption of 2 watts. I'm not an eco-warrior but there are limits and I'm certainly not going to waste that much power just for the rare convenience of a 1 second start up. To save you working it out, the consumption is about 131 kWh per year!
Maybe I sound a bit harsh with my criticisms. If I do, it is only because I have lived with the old machine and the new machine long enough to know what fantastic bits of kit they both are but how frustrating it is to have such a superb piece of equipment sitting in front of me but have it stupidly restricted in it's capabilities. It could easily be made to do just what I want it to do, and I'm sure future machines will. In the mean time I will just have to live with it being a superb recorder producing magnificent pictures with the minimum of effort. Would I recommend it? Of course I would. It is probably the best machine of it's type on the market. I may be frustrated but I am not disappointed.
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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant, but flawed., 27 Sep 2008
The is a step up from the previous model, with a larger hard drive and the ability to add CD albums, whose titles can be fetched with Gracenote (so you don't have to type them in yourself).
It's an excellent recorder, but has some serious limitations. The first is that you can't back up the hard drive. You can put your entire music collection on here, but if the drive fails, you will lose everything. The usb connection is simply for adding mp3 tracks - you can't connect an external hard drive and record onto it.
The second also involves the music recording side. Whilst you can create your own "groups" of tracks from mp3 files, you can't from CDs. This means you cannot pick and choose which tracks from your CDs you want to record. It's the whole CD or nothing, with no facility to combine recordings - so you cannot create your own playlists. The documentation is fairly misleading on this, so take note.
I bought the previous model, but only recently had cause to burn some DVD discs. I burnt around a dozen, before the RAM drive failed. By this time it was out of warranty, and the cost of repair is greater than buying a new machine. I'm still waiting to see if Panasonic will pay for the repair, as Amazon failed to respond to my complaint about it.
However, I was able to save the tv recordings on the hard drive by hooking it up to the new model with a scart cable and setting the new machine to record from the input from the old machine. But you loose all chapters, thumbnails & titles and have to divide the recording into the separate programmes manually - very time consuming, but at least it is possible.
I hope that the problem with the RAM drive is a one-off, but we'll see.
The ability to group tv recordings is a vast improvement on the old model, as it allows much easier transfer of an entire series to DVD and you can now record entire series in one go (although there are limitations to this). Saying that, the EPG is not nearly as good as the previous model, as the window has been squeezed to allow targetted advertising. It is difficult to read what day it's on when setting up a recording because it's now badly squashed, even on a 32" tv.
Panasonic isn't alone in not offering a facility to back up the hard drive (presumably copy-protection limitations enforced by the industry), but this lack seriously hampers HDD recorders, particularly ones with Jukebox facilities. It would be nice to see this rectified in future, along with the other shortcomings and with the ability to mix mp3 and cd tracks added.
Finally, if the artist/tracks are not on the Gracenotes database, you're forced to add them manually. This also means adding the Artist repeatedly for each track - there is no facility to group tracks and add the artist once for them all, another irritating flaw.
I would also hope the next machine would have a high definition tuner built-in.
Saying all that, it is still one of the better machines in a very small market at this price point.
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46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
DMR-EX88 - Outstanding Excellence, 20 Jul 2008
Well I have to say after two weeks of use I'm absolutely knocked out by it's performance. The picture quality is superb and the copy quality from the Hard Drive is the best I've seen. Having had two previous Panasonic recorder/hdd combo's this really is their best yet.
As a previous reviewer noted the instruction details could do with a user friendly tweak, but that aside I have yet to see a better machine.
If you use and record from a HD source you will require calming measures as the end product should carry a Government health warning.
So should you be in the market for a dvd/hdd recorder look no further.
Highly recommended.
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