Labs

Panasonic's DMR-EX87 has a single digital TV tuner, so anyone without digital TV reception should steer well clear. The front panel hides the usual phono and composite inputs, along with S-video and FireWire. There's no USB port, but there is an SD memory card reader on the front of the PVR.

The card reader makes it easy to display your photos directly from an SD card, to back them up to the 250GB hard disk and to archive them to a recordable DVD. You can even record TV directly to the SD card, which is very useful if you have a compatible portable media player. It's not as flexible as a USB port, though, as you can't connect the same range of devices.

As there's only a single tuner you can't record two programmes at once,

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and you'll need to use your TV's tuner if you want to watch something else while recording. The EPG is easily the best among the hard disk/DVD combo PVRs. It shows two-and-a-half hours of programming over seven channels at a time and is quick and easy to navigate. However, it doesn't help you to resolve recording conflicts, and simply records the programme that starts first.

The DMR-EX87 has two standby modes. The quick start mode lives up to its name but uses 17W while idle. The very efficient Power Save mode is better. It reduces standby power use to only 2W, although it does then take 20 to 30 seconds to return to full operation.

The remote control is well designed, but is rather let down by some annoying control decisions. The timeshifting, for example, has to be activated manually using its own button, and then you have to press play to return to the beginning of the buffer before you can pause or search through the buffered material. You can't access the EPG while timeshifting, either.

Picture quality is better than average for the group, both for DVD playback and TV broadcasts. The player can also upscale TV and DVD to a resolution of 1080p. Despite a decent EPG and good picture quality, Panasonic's PVR just loses out to Samsung's DVD-SH855M PVR, which has its more flexible media handling.