Panasonic TUCTH100 PVR revisted
Early in May, my old PVR failed, and I replaced it with the aforementioned Panachronic model. I was happy/not happy with it to varying degrees. Read my full thoughts here.
This afternoon I took it back to John Lewis and swapped it for a Digifusion model, the same as I had before. Better the devil you know, in this case. Why did I take it back?
I've always found its interface clunky and slow, a software problem. Not properly thought through, and not well executed. Things I took for granted with the Digifusion (like adding a few minutes to the end of a scheduled recording) were very difficult to achieve with the Panasonic. Selecting the channels you wanted to see (favourites) was just a meaningless exercise on the Pana, and never worked as it should. And Fast-Forwarding was inconveniently pitched at either a slow 3x (which looked more like 2x) or 12x plus, with no happy medium.
So there was that. And then there was the time I set it to record House and Grey's Anatomy, and it froze up and appeared to have recorded 11 hours of the same channel. Never mind, I thought. I wanted the first two hours at least. Only it turned out the 11 hour block was a mere 3 minutes long.
And then there was the time when I went on holiday last week, having filled its 24 recording slots with planned events... And got back today to find it had frozen up on BBC2 some time last Saturday and had recorded NOTHING all week long. I missed Doctor Who, two episodes of Prison Break, another week of NYPD Blue, and lots of other stuff... sigh. And we're not even going to mention the dysentery I got on holiday, or the 100 kph winds.*
So back to the shop it went. The Digifusion is not perfect, but its operating system is more responsive and when you push a button on its ugly remote, something actually happens.
*I exaggerate. A bit.
This afternoon I took it back to John Lewis and swapped it for a Digifusion model, the same as I had before. Better the devil you know, in this case. Why did I take it back?
I've always found its interface clunky and slow, a software problem. Not properly thought through, and not well executed. Things I took for granted with the Digifusion (like adding a few minutes to the end of a scheduled recording) were very difficult to achieve with the Panasonic. Selecting the channels you wanted to see (favourites) was just a meaningless exercise on the Pana, and never worked as it should. And Fast-Forwarding was inconveniently pitched at either a slow 3x (which looked more like 2x) or 12x plus, with no happy medium.
So there was that. And then there was the time I set it to record House and Grey's Anatomy, and it froze up and appeared to have recorded 11 hours of the same channel. Never mind, I thought. I wanted the first two hours at least. Only it turned out the 11 hour block was a mere 3 minutes long.
And then there was the time when I went on holiday last week, having filled its 24 recording slots with planned events... And got back today to find it had frozen up on BBC2 some time last Saturday and had recorded NOTHING all week long. I missed Doctor Who, two episodes of Prison Break, another week of NYPD Blue, and lots of other stuff... sigh. And we're not even going to mention the dysentery I got on holiday, or the 100 kph winds.*
So back to the shop it went. The Digifusion is not perfect, but its operating system is more responsive and when you push a button on its ugly remote, something actually happens.
*I exaggerate. A bit.
posted by Anonymous at
Saturday, June 03, 2006
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