It's no exaggeration to say that the £1,000 DMR-BS850 is the most advanced digital recorder ever sold in the UK; due to go down in AV history as the UK's first Blu-ray recorder, it sports a 500GB hard drive and twin Freesat HD tuners.

That alone would be enough to grab headlines. But the deck does more. As I slowly, reverentially snooped my way around this review sample, I began to wonder not what it could do, but what it couldn't.

David Preece, Panasonic's marketing manager, told me weeks ago that it wasn't so much a recorder as a media hub. And I think he's right. The thing is the Cadillac of convergence.

Out of the box, the BS850 is not significantly taller than Panasonic's current BD player offerings, the DMP-BD60 and BD80. It looks meaningful if conservative. A fascia flap to the right pulls down to reveal analogue video inputs, SD card slot and a firewire port. The latter sent a ripple of excitement up my spine because I thought I'd be able to dub some of my old home movies up to Blu-ray – then I realised I didn't have a working DV camcorder. Oh well.

The disc tray is offset to the left (but in typically perverse Panasonic style, the eject button is ranged to the right). Backside connections include analogue AV inputs, two Scarts, HDMI out, component and (multi-purpose) Ethernet.

This BD deck is Profile 2.0 BonusView compliant. Yet more significantly it allows access to Panasonic's proprietary Viera Cast gateway to internet content. Currently that means you can view YouTube videos and browse Picassa photo albums (my online photo account is with Flickr – doh!). And as this is a Freesat HD unit, it also means that you'll be able to access the BBC iPlayer – once it goes live on Freesat.

The LAN connection on this deck will clearly get a lot more use than the average BD disc-spinner. Unfortunately, despite Ethernet connectivity the device isn't networkable. It wasn't discovered by other devices on my LAN, which seems kind of odd in this day and age.

Copy and burn

With two tuners (a much overdue first for Panasonic), it means you can record two channels simultaneously. Using the 7-day Freesat EPG, you'll be given the option to record a show in HD if ITV is broadcasting two versions.

All recordings are made to the unit's hard drive in DR (bitstream) format. That's to say, you record exactly the transport stream delivered, giving you access to bolt-ons like subtitles and audio descriptions. Naturally, this also means image and sound quality are as transmitted (which in the case of BBC HD is generally awesome). You can then dub these to BD in any one of four HD compression modes (HG, HX, HE, HL) which reduce the bit-rate incrementally.

The most economic, HL, allows 12 hours on a single-layer BD-R, effectively squishing recordings with a bitrate of 14Mbps to just 4Mbps. It's a remarkable example of advanced h.264 economy. I found artefacts to be low and for most viewers the results will still look undeniably hi-def.

The 500GB drive can store approximately 77 hours of HD, or 215 hours of SD. If your hard drive starts to clog up with DR sat recordings, you can compress them on the drive itself. This is a real-time process. So if you have six hours of Nature's Great Events archived, then it'll take just as long to compress them. Best leave the BS850 doing its thing overnight.