Panasonic Batteries

[DerbyBorn]

Are they any good - or are we being hoodwinked with a "quality" label?

[polygonum]

I don't feel hoodwinked by the label.

Are you talking about ordinary alkaline AA/AAA cells? My view is that they seem to be perfectly OK but have a lower effective capacity than some others. No problem with leakage, with life in storage, etc. But nothing special. However, they are often less expensive than some others.

[Brian Gaff]

Seem as good as most alkalines are. For all I know all these could just be brand engineered Duracells. That is except the flying bomb ones you find in those cheap rubbish stores. Brian

[Martin Crossley]

Crikey, I haven't seen Flying Bombs for 30-odd years! I've found Panasonic alkaline in AA, and ordinary AAA and 006P/LR14 sizes perfectly acceptable, though nothing special, but "Enercell" alkalines from Home Bargains to be cheaper and better, with Aldi's & Lidl's at similar prices to the Panasonics' and life similar to the Enercells'. And "Powercell" from B&M no good.

[Martin Crossley]

Sorry, Going senile! Just realised I've probably cocked up the names of the Home Bargains' and B&M's batteries. If so, sincere apologies to the manufacturers mentioned, but for the life of me can't remember the true names. Nurse might be along in 25 years to help...

[Huge]

After the deeply shitty PVR we foolishly bought recently, I won't be buying anything from Panasonic ever again. YMMV.

[The Medway Handyman]

We use them all the time & they are fine. TLC Direct do them cheap as chips. IIRC 12 x AA + 12 x AAA for about £6.

[DerbyBorn]

Huge wrote in news:bm610eFs60gU1 @mid.individual.net:

Crikey - will Panasonic read this?

[Martin Brown]

Aldi & Lidl sometimes have bargain NiMH rechargeable with low self discharge that are very good value for money (at least previous batches have been). I can never remember which is which. Batteries labelled Tronic (be sure to lok for the red low self discharge ones though).

Depending on what you want them for even the horrid leak like hell zinc chloride 20 for £1 Chinese junk from PoundShop etc can be value for money. I occasionally need to light a dark village footpath some evenings and LED units with ultra cheap batteries are perfect for that duty. They only have to work for just a few hours at 0.3A or so (in practice they are usually still glowing the next morning as the LEDs draw much less current as the terminal voltage drops).

[Andy Burns]

In which case I think they're the Lidl ones, never bought any from Aldi

Some of the Tronic LSD have been black.

[stuart noble]

Ikea!

[Lee]

+1 for Ikea alkalines, seem to last easily as long as other brands and cheap enough to buy a couple of spare packs to last until the next visit ;)

[Capitol]

Probably another rebranded product with crap firmware. Her Vesta? manufactured £60 PVR was appalling to use, but yesterday I retuned it and it's control system magically began to work properly for the first time in a year. Its predecessor was branded Sharp and the Sharp controller also works on this one. The Sharp version lasted about 5 years, so there's been very little software change. I haven't yet experienced a PVR which didn't require rebooting on at least a once a month basis. I think the designers(?) were trained by Microsoft.

[Andrew Gabriel]

I bought them a while back, and they nearly all leaked.

More recently, I was buying the GP Super from CPC at around £6 for a box of 40, but they switched over to a lower capacity GP Alkaline for their bulk packs which don't last as long, so I stopped buying them. After a bit of experimenting, I found the Costco bulk packs to be good, but not gone through a lot of them yet.

[Huge]

I have a note on my "things to do" list to (i) find out who the head of Panasonic UK is & (ii) write to them and ask for my money back.

The problem is by the time I come to my study, the towering rage induced by using the useless PoS PVR has usually subsided.

[Huge]

It's not as good as that. It simply isn't fit for purpose. And all the online reviews, and the bloke in Richer Sounds, said it was a good one. I don't know what they were reviewing, but it wasn't the waste of good electrons we've got. It doesn't crash, but it has the worst UI of any device I've ever used, and certain fundamental functions cannot be accessed when it's recording. It's a pathetic piece of junk. Sadly, we've had it some months now, so I can't really take it back to RS. It took us several weeks to work out how to drive it, given the manual was written in Portugese by an Inuit who'd never seen the device, then translated into "English" by a dyslexic Yanomamo tribesman who spoke neither language. That too is the worst manual I've ever got with a piece of electronics, and some of the contents are outright lies.

Right, that's fired me up enough to actually write the letter!

[Tim Watts]

On Friday 14 February 2014 11:49 Huge wrote in uk.d-i-y:

Ignore Sony too.

I have a DVD player, perfectly good. My niece fiddle with the controls and managed to put it into some sort of lock-disc mode.

I have followed various web guides and a technical support call to unlock it - all to no avail.

Nothing in the actual instructions of course.

The last response was "send it in for repair".

No, can't be bothered for a £50 DVD player. But Sony are also on my shit list now. I will add your Panasonic to the list...

So far IME, Samsung seem quite good across a number of types of items (2 TVs, 2006 monitor I'm typing on now, 3 smartphones.

[Capitol]

Hmm. Sounds like the TVonics I have in the kitchen. That has the AD (audio description) function. Took me a week of looking through menus which allowed me to change the volume but not get rid of it. I then found the AD button on the controller which switches it on and off! It's speed control function buttons have various states of working depending on what it feels like. Two pushes give x2 speeds unless it's confused in which case two pushes is pause. The software cannot keep pace with the hardware I guess. Now I know why TVonics went broke!

[Huge]

[11 lines of ranting snipped]

Actually, our previous PVR was a Sony, and very good it was, too. Sadly, it's started to die intermittently, so we thought we'd buy a new one, but the Panasonic is about as much use as a dried dog poo, so we're going to get the Sony repaired if possible and demote the Panasonic to the bedroom. Or get my money back. Maybe.

When it is recording you cannot;

(i) Add any more programmes to be recorded. Pressing "Guide" when it's already recording something just pops up a windows saying "Cannot be done while recording" or somesuch. That means if you've started a recording and you spot something on later you'd like to record, you can't.

(ii) Delete any already recorded programmes. Same pop-up.

Also, it does not resume where you've left off in any given recording, if you've done anything else in the meanwhile.

The fact that Brian designed the UI is another point against it.

Splendid. It's a DMR-EX86EB.

[Clive George]

Aren't their breadmakers the ones to get?

I'd expect them to be a rather different division to PVRs, so wouldn't let a bad experience with that put me off the other.