We have reviewed the DMR-EX87, an HDD/DVD recorder with a mighty 250GB capacity. Clearly, not everyone needs such a large hard disk, and its for these users that Panasonic has come up with this 160GB version, which costs a good £150 less.

The EX77 shares the same plain black styling and impeccable build quality of the EX87. But unlike its sibling, is also available in silver if you fancy going a bit retro.

Features

The deck boasts an almost flawless feature list, with few significant omissions. Perhaps the most attention-grabbing feature on the spec sheet is 1080p, 1080i and 720p upscaling, which maximises the quality of DVD and recorded images on HD Ready and full HD TVs. It won't give you proper high-definition picture quality, but should offer some improvement over plain old 576p images.

Significant, too, is the inclusion of a Freeview tuner, backed up by a superbly designed seven-day EPG. It makes setting timer recordings effortless, but sadly there's no Series Recording feature as found on Sony's latest range of HDD combis. There's also no back-up analogue tuner, so make sure your Freeview reception is up to scratch.

The hard disk offers up to 284hr of recording time, and the deck will write to any DVD disc you care to slip into the tray, even dual-layer DVD-R and +Rs (but only when copying from the hard disk). As for playback, it spins most types of disc except DVD-Audio.

The connection roster is equally comprehensive and includes the all-important HDMI socket, component video output, two Scarts (offering RGB input and output) and an optical digital audio output. There's no CI slot for pay TV, but it's no great loss.

The front sports iLink input for transferring DV camcorder footage, an SD card slot plus S-video and composite video inputs. This may be more generous than your average digital recorder, but it's trumped by the similarly priced Sony RDR-HXD870, which, offers USB and PictBridge.

For recordings, you can select one of four quality presets (XP, SP, LP and EP) that enable you to trade off picture quality for recording time. There's also a Flexible Recording mode, which fits a programme onto the remaining disc space in the best possible quality.