Panasonic enters the PVR market

Panasonic DMR-HW220 front

Panasonic were quick to jump into releasing a Blu-ray recorder, but left alone the growing PVR market. They’ve now filled in that gap with the DMR-HW220.

The DMR-HW220 is a twin-tuner personal video recorder, both high definition, allowing you to watch one channel and record another, or record two channels simultaneously. Onboard is a 1 terabyte hard drive, that will hold around 140 hours of HD programs.



You’re not just stuck with watching free-to-air programs, the inbuilt Viera IPTV you’re able to do a little social networking, make Skype calls, watch some YouTube, or access the Seven Network’s PLUS7 and ABC’ iView services.

Or, watch your own media content. The inbuilt wi-fi, and DLNA capability of the DMR-HW220 allows you to play media files via your home network – your photos, video and music.

It also seems that the DMR-HW22o is not hamstrung by the restrictions of the Freeview consortium, with a 60-second skip forward button and a 10-second rewind button, ad-skipping is possible.

Panasonic DMR-HW220 price and availability

The Panasonic DMR-HW220 is available now, at an RRP of $499.

Specifications

  • Transfer and playback of HD movies (AVCHD) with SD memory card slot and USB terminal
  • Extra storage with external HDD
  • USB playback
  • Connections: 1 x HDMI output, 1 x composite video output, 1 x analogue audio output, 1 x digital audio optical output, 1 x LAN ethernet terminal, 2 x USB terminals (FLAC, MP3, JPEG and DivX/DivX playback, MKV/MP4, MPO) + mass storage device + Skype Camera (TY-CC20W)