AssasinK
Member
There is a thread on AVForums that will be familiar to anyone who has kept an old Panasonic recorder in the chain. Chap buys a used DMR-EX87, connects it by HDMI to a modern digital TV, watches Freeview through the recorder, and the sound comes out muffled and slightly distorted while the picture is also worse than feeding Freeview straight to the set. His previous DMR-EX773 was better at both.
Before anyone books a repair, the likely answer is that nothing is broken. Recorders of that generation carry a standard definition Freeview tuner, so watching through the box means an SD picture getting scaled up by hardware designed years before the panel it is now feeding. The TV's own tuner is newer, receives more, and its scaler is better. You are paying a quality tax for the convenience of one remote.
The sound has a more fixable set of suspects. Check the HDMI audio output setting on the recorder for a bitstream versus PCM choice and try the other one, because a TV that quietly falls back to a degraded decode will sound exactly like that description. Check whether the recorder's digital audio output is set for Dolby Digital or downmixed stereo. Also worth forcing the HDMI resolution setting rather than leaving it on auto, since auto negotiation between kit that old and a current TV is not always the sensible handshake you assume.
The uncomfortable answer is that the EX87 is best used as a recorder and player, and live viewing should go to the TV tuner. That is not a fault, that is 2007 hardware doing 2007 things.
Anyone got one of these still in daily service, and did you find a setting that genuinely closed the gap?
Before anyone books a repair, the likely answer is that nothing is broken. Recorders of that generation carry a standard definition Freeview tuner, so watching through the box means an SD picture getting scaled up by hardware designed years before the panel it is now feeding. The TV's own tuner is newer, receives more, and its scaler is better. You are paying a quality tax for the convenience of one remote.
The sound has a more fixable set of suspects. Check the HDMI audio output setting on the recorder for a bitstream versus PCM choice and try the other one, because a TV that quietly falls back to a degraded decode will sound exactly like that description. Check whether the recorder's digital audio output is set for Dolby Digital or downmixed stereo. Also worth forcing the HDMI resolution setting rather than leaving it on auto, since auto negotiation between kit that old and a current TV is not always the sensible handshake you assume.
The uncomfortable answer is that the EX87 is best used as a recorder and player, and live viewing should go to the TV tuner. That is not a fault, that is 2007 hardware doing 2007 things.
Anyone got one of these still in daily service, and did you find a setting that genuinely closed the gap?
