Gadgets & Gizmos

Before you balk at the almost £700 price tag of this dual-tuner Freesat+ PVR, consider that the BS880E is also a Blu-ray recorder, and can stream your digital media via ethernet and DLNA. No, fair enough, it does still seem likea pretty balk-worthy price tag. Freesat provides subscription free TV via a satellite dish. You need a dual LNB as without it you’re stuck with using only one of the two tuners, and most flat dwellers will find their communal dish does NOT offer this facility.
With a dual feed you can record two shows at once, or watch one and record another, as well as pausing live TV for up to two hours. We picked up well over 130 channels, with three HD ones: BBC J HD, BBC HD and 1TV 1HD. Hi-def image quality is comparable to Sky and standard-def is pretty good 100, Thanks to an ethernet port you can access BBC iPlayer,with lTV Playe rto be added later this year.
Image quality is perfectly acceptable on a 42-inch TV,despite the fact that it streams in “High Quality” rather than true HD. You can also access Panasonic’s Viera Cast portal. with Twitter,Daily Motion and Accuweather apps. The 500GB PVRcan store up to 76hours of HD or 212 hours of SD. You can also archive footage on BD-RE or BD-R. Blu-ray imageand audio quality are excellent
However,although the build quality feels rock solid, the EPG is desperately old-fashioned and the box can be frustratingly sluggish. Given that, it’s hard to justify the luxury price of this Panasonic box.