The rather innocuous silver unit measures 350 x 253 x 65mm and fits in nicely with most modern TV's and flat panels. Powering up the TUCTH100 kicks the fans into life which seem take make more than their fair share of noise and seem to run even when the unit is hardly doing anything.

Our first task was to load up the EPG the Panasonic holds 7 days worth of EPG data and the first time we set the box up it took a good 23 minutes to download all the listings into the box. The EPG itself isn't the best we've seen, once you've selected a channel it only shows the listings for that service which is a bit of a pain and its not exactly speedy in navigation taking a few seconds to switch between listings.

That said you can use the EPG to mark up what you want to record in a very Sky+ like fashion, however we did note that once you've marked up a recording and powered down the box its not possible to see what you have tagged on the EPG although you can see a list of scheduled recordings elsewhere. You can receive over 30 TV channels free of charge with Freeview but that will be your limit as the Panasonic does not have the ability to take a Top Up TV card.

Recordings were of a very high quality with only slight pixelation, we calculate you'd get around 40 hours onto the 80gb internal hard drive and the quality isn't that far off DVD to the untrained eye. Replay is straight forward process but still not quite as slick as the Sky+ system, you can also time shift live TV using one of the tuners and the unit will always be recording a 15 minute buffer unless you instruct otherwise.

The Panasonic TUCTH100 also has some simple editing features included allowing not only to fast forward through adverts but to actually trim them out of the recorded file altogether, this is primarily design so you can offload the recorded files to VHS or other outboard storage.

Our recordings did suffer from a number of software bugs, firstly we couldn't find anyway to extend recordings, so if a programme is running late the EPG may update to reflect this but the box will not take this information into account meaning our test recordings of snooker were all incomplete. Our PVR also seemed to have a habit of freezing every so often this almost always seemed to coincide with instructions to rewind the live programme or when performing a number of complicated tasks.

It does look like despite the unit being some 4 months late to market (at least) it is still with a more than its fair share of bugs, a Panasonic dealer we were talking to said almost 70% of the units he had sold had returned to his store within 14 days. It's a real shame as this twin tuner Freeview unit does make 1st class recordings and the software user interface isn't that bad, but a PVR has to perform its primary function reliably.

There is no point in disappearing off on business expecting a  weeks worth of east enders on your unit only to find  it froze the day after you left, we really had high hopes that this would be the first useable Freeview PVR but Panasonic need to release a new version of software ASAP before the TUCTH100 gets a reputation it can't recover from.

Priced at £239 you'd be a brave man to buy one just now, its expected that a new release of software is planned for June but if Panasonics timing can be gauged from the initial device release it may take much longer.

Published - 24/04/2005

More Freeview Box Reviews-

[ Up ] [ Panasonic TUCTH100 Freeview PVR ] [ Slingbox Review ] [ Topfield Freeview PVR Review ] [ Humax 9200-T Freeview PVR Review ] [ Sagem 6280T PVR Review ] [ Thomson Top Up TV Plus ] [ Goodmans GHD8015F2 Review ] [ Sony Freeview PVR ]