The smart remote control is easy to get to grips with,while the onscreen displays are very familiar to those who've seen Panasonic decks before.

The only fiddly bit of setup is assigning your video outputs and inputs - read the manual carefully at this point, if at no other! There's no point investing in a DVD recorder and then hooking it up incorrectly.

Time to mention the lack of an RGB Scart again. If you have an S-video digibox you won't mind too much.Images will still be clean and highly detailed. If you have to make do with composite signals that means you will have to make do with straying reds as well.

The one- and two-hour modes each capture pictures virtually indistinguishable from the original broadcast.Every bit of detail on the signal is faithfully transferred to disc,with only slight degradation in the form of minor artefacting in two-hour mode.

The four-hour setting is very good.You won't want to use it for sports,where the fast camera motion will create blocking and mosquito haze,but on films the results are fine,and way above VHS quality.

Six- and eight-hour settings introduce more picture break-up, but there is no strobe effect and the quality remains better than VHS in terms of detail.

Pausing a recording leaves you with very smooth edit points, making this an effective tool in the battle to cram a long recording on to a disc at a high-quality setting.

Pre-recorded disc playback benefits from the RGB Scart output, looking impressive and clean,with excellent colours (bright reds stay in their place rather than roaming about at will as they do on composite signals).And just look at all those 'Excellent' readings in our DVD playback lab tests.

Progressive scan pictures see the stability of the image improved still further,but RGB pictures are plenty good enough if you don't have a prog-scan TV.

Audio performance is strong as well.The two-channel DVD-Audio playback is a bit of a strange offering, as the format really shines in a multi-channel environment,but regular movie soundtracks are delivered to a home cinema amp with some poise.

This is therefore a very impressive budget recorder. It exudes quality and class and will do great service for many,no doubt.We can't help but think,however,that it would have been so much better if it had been given an RGB Scart input - but as we're about to run out of space, that's the last time we'll mention it. Jason Glenn