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The DMR-BW500 lets you watch DVD and Blu-ray movies, transfer HD home movies to disc and watch and record high-def television to DVD, Blu-ray or the built-in hard drive. It is also much quieter and faster to load movies than the first generation of clunky Blu-ray players.
The DMR-BW500 supports Blu-ray's BonusView standard for extra content but not the more advanced BD-Live interactive standard for downloading content - which is disappointing considering more movie houses are starting to commit to using BD-Live.
At the rear of the recorder are HDMI 1.3 and coax/optical digital audio outputs along with the other usual suspects. There's also an Ethernet port for downloading track info when ripping CDs to the hard drive, but it won't play media files across your home network.
The DMR-BW500's picture quality is superb and it supports 1080p, 24 fps playback as well as the latest sound formats including Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD. As a PVR, it can extract a seven day EPG from the broadcast signal and its twin HD tuners let you record two shows at once, whilst watching a recording or a disc.
You can pause live TV but there's no automatic buffer for rewinding live TV. The unit isn't as flexible or user-friendly as a TiVo, although it does let you skip forward through the ad breaks in 60 second increments.
Thankfully it confirms when you press stop while recording and you can't accidentally change channel whilst time-shifting. Of the five recording qualities on offer, only "DR" mode does justice to HD broadcasts and the generous 500GB hard drive is good for 62 hours of DR recordings.
A 25GB Blu-ray disc holds around 3 hours of 1080i content, while HD recordings are compressed if copied to a standard DVD. As if that wasn't enough, you can copy also MP3, JPEG, MPEG2 and high-def AVCHD files (but not recorded television) to and from the hard drive and an SD card, USB stick, disc or camcorder - although there are limitations.
For an Australian first the DMR-BW500 is very impressive, especially if you're shooting home movies in AVCHD. Even so, the high price tag and lack of BD-Live support makes it tempting for all but early adopters to wait for the next model.