Panasonic TUCT20

The Panasonic TUCT20 is real value for money and easy to set up and use. we bought ours 5 years ago and it still works, it's the remote thats gone and am currentky searching to see if we can purchase one.

The box kept locking up many time and I had to unplug and leave it switched off and then plug it back in again. This was expensive. I should have gone with a cheaper model. I will not make the same mistake again with Panasonic. In my opinion, this has been a waste of money

I think this freeview box is seriously overpriced when new at £75 - you can buy 3 newer receivers for that now and they are probably hundreds of times better.Best place for it now is the bin.

The Panasonic TUCT20 is a very expensive box. I paid nearly £100 from a discount store. My first box, I didn't know what to expect. I'm disappointed with freeview in general compared to analogue, the cheaper Tesco box in the kitchen doesn't lock up so much, though the remote is more sluggish. I think the Panasonic price warrants a better engineered product!

Panasonic are are top brand name, but the Panasonic TUCT20 Freeview box is a true disaster. It fails on almost every front. I cannot believe that you can still buy this from Comet for £70!

The Panasonic TUCT20 is a really bad product. For two years I put up with the picture freezing every few minutes and lip-sync problems that made it feel as if I was watching one programme whilst listening to another! Add to this the occasional need to power it off and on again when it locked up completely, made it a very annoying piece of kit. I live in a good reception area, have a good aerial for digital TV reception plus a signal booster.

I finally went out and purchased a Sagem 602 from Richer Sounds for just £39.95, took it home, plugged it in and set it up. What a difference! Not only did the picture freezing and lip-sync problems vanish, but the picture was sharper too. The signal strength is typically around 75% and signal quality 98% - proving that the aerial is good.

The Panasonic, which had an external power supply, also ran quite hot.

Have had a Panasonic TUCT20 for a couple of years and have suffered poor picture quality. Eventually called in an aerial specialist - he immediately replaced it with a Bush and bingo! - No problem with the aerial.

Not being a big sports fan and therefore a prime candidate for the great satellite TV rip-off, Freeview sounded just fine for me. Have always trusted the Panasonic brand, but frankly, what a disappointment. I am now on my second of these units - the first went back as it wouldn't work at all! This one just about works, but suffers from a number of problems and I'm currently trying to get this sorted out too.

Firstly it has a tendency to not latch onto the strongest available signal for some channels - such as The Hits, TMF and UK Brightideas, so we find ourselves having to put up with "the Norman Collier effect" (sound and vision drop-outs) on these channels, except for the rare occasions where a re-tune makes the unit latch onto the stronger transmitter. Then there's the video and audio going out of sync. Finally and worst of all there's the locking out, where the unit freezes and the only means of correction is to waste 5-10 minutes powering down and re setting up.

Frankly, this half-baked product is a disgrace to the Panasonic brand. What's more, if this is the future of TV transmissions (as proposed by the UK Government, who want to switch off analogue transmissions) then I urge an urgent re-think!

Truly dire and most definitely not recommended.

I have two of these boxes and having seen just about all the Freeview boxes the Panasonic TUCT20 of the two best (with Philips DTR1500). Small and compact with a separate power supply means the box runs cool for a long life (my boxes are from Oct 2002 and Jan 2003 respectively).There have been 4 software downloads since I got my first box which has kept the boxes up to date with changes to Freeview and the MHeg text. The latest is v1.14(a).The original remote was small & very neat, there is larger one for the latest TU-CT30 (which has a timer and can cope with the new 7-day EPG which the TU-CT20 cannot.

Quality products from Panasonic. The choice box especially for elderly people who want simple channel selection and need on-off switching to RGB via SCART pin8.

This Panasonic TUCT20 is a poor box and Panasonic will not be doing any more software updates to fix the problems.

The box can freeze when tuned into a channel that doesn't have a high signal strength, requiring the box to be powered down to fix it. Also the audio and video can become out of sync which is really annoying when you've recorded an entire programme where the audio is a second ahead of the video. This box will never be able to use the 7 day EPG when it eventually comes out. Also one of the buffers seems to overrun, as sometimes when you change a channel the screen is covered in graphics that shouldn't be there, again requiring a reboot to resolve it.