I love this unit!

Author's Rating:

Pros: Quiet, rich features, good picture and sound, plenty of inputs, easy recoding setup

Cons: price, terrible manual, should allow for less than 1minute commercial skip

The Bottom Line: 
Pricey, but overall an excellent addition to the media room. Lots of very useful features that the average user will love.

Author's Review
I've had this unit for a few weeks now. I would not have paid the $500 list price, but couldn't say no to an open box item at Circuit City for $250.

In general, this box does a whole lot. Here's a few things I find most useful...
- I can backup my camcorder tapes onto the hard-drive via the DV input, do some basic editing and then copy it to DVD. Much easier to find space to store dozens of DVD disks rather than Digital Hi8 tapes in our firebox.
- I use the DVR feature to watch all TV now. And no monthly Tivo fees. Why would anyone pay monthly when a DVR does it for free. Yeah, you can't pause and rewind live tv. So what? Just hit the record button and you get the same functionality.
- VHS->Hard drive->Edit->DVD. VHS tapes don't last forever, so finally getting the old, old family tapes digitized is a relief.
- Watching a slideshow of our digital pictures is very cool. I find myself viewing old pix more often now that it's so easy. No more rummaging through the old albums (though that's sort of fun once in a while too). The SD slot is very useful for this feature. Having the family over for Christmas? Load a bunch of past Christmas pix onto an SD card, slap it in and have the slideshow run in the background with the Christmas music. Guests love it.
- If two shows that I watch are on at the same time, I download one in DIVX/XVID format, but it onto a disk and play it on this unit.

Setup was a breeze for me. I read a lot of reviews where people were having difficulty, especially with the online TV Guide setup. I'm happy to say that I just plugged mine in, left it powered off for a day and viola, it just worked!

The remote is a little cumbersome. They should have put a little more thought into the placement of the commonly used buttons, especially commercial skip. My having to use 2 hands to do this is a failure on Panny's part. Also, 1 minute is too long for commercial skip. I always hit it one too many times and then have to slowly rewind back. Almost takes the fun out of skipping commercials. This should be configurable. Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) defaults to 30 seconds. They also used the skip back button (|<<) to go back 5 seconds, so if you overshoot on the commercial skip, you just hit that once or twice. That worked very nicely.

Another thing lacking on this unit that I had with MCE is that recorded TV shows retained the episode description. So, when I sit down and scroll through dozens of recorded shows trying to figure out which to watch, I can see the descriptions. For some reason, Panny decided that this info can only be viewed when you're in the TV guide.

I know I'm asking way too much here, but being a MCE user, I miss the network connectivity aspect. It opens a lot of doors feature-wise:
- watch divx/jpeg files on other computers connected to home network
- listen to mp3 files located on other computers
- get more TV show info
Maybe next generation!

Annoyances:
- Too many restrictions on what you can and cannot do with certain disk formats. For example, I can watch divx files burned on a DVD-R, but not on a DVD RW. What's up with that? I'd like to copy divx files onto a RW, watch it and then reuse the disk. There are other examples. I'm not sure why all media cannot be played on all storage formats. Shouldn't matter if I have an MP3 on the SD card, or a DIVX file on the hard drive, etc.
- Often, I'll try to play a DIVX file while a show is being recorded onto the hard-drive. This unit does not allow this. I think that the same happens if I want to watch a plain DVD movie too. This forced me to place a 2nd DVD player in my entertainment center, which is already too crowded.