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Once again, Panasonic's served up a feature-rich PVR/DVD-recorder and saddled it with an unfriendly remote control and befuddling menu structure. DLNA streaming and plenty of storage space make this a sensible buy, but only for those with plenty of patience.
Design
The appeal of Panasonic's DMR-XW480 certainly doesn't lie in its visual style. It's a plain black box, like any other AV box that you may come across. About the only genuine oddity in its design is that the eject button for the DVD tray sits on the opposite side to the tray itself, and the button above the tray controls the unit's power. It's a design we've seen before, and it's annoying, because if you hit the closest button to the tray, rather than ejecting, the whole unit simply shuts down.
The XW480 utilises Panasonic's standard remote control layout, which we've had issues with for years now. It's most charitably described as overly busy. It offers up a lot of functionality directly from the remote, but it's buried under layers of menus and often baffling labels.
Features
It's the feature set of the DMR-XW480 that makes it interesting. First of all, it's a dual-HD tuner digital TV recorder with an in-built 500GB hard drive and DVD Super Multi writer built in. It's also network aware, which brings in two slightly different sets of functions. Firstly, there's Panasonic's Viera Cast, which allows access to Picasa, Weather, Bloomberg Television and YouTube. There's also a number of blank icons on the Viera Cast main screen, suggesting functions that may be built into the firmware in the future. As always, we can only assess the features available right now, because promises of future functionality don't always play out as actual features down the track.
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