Dr Gadget - Gadget Shop - Sony RDR-HXD870 - DVD Recorder With 160GB Hard Drive - With Freeview - Silver.

	List Price: Our Price: £198.99 Your Save: £ ( % ) Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours Manufacturer: Sony
Average Customer Rating:
Binding: Electronics Brand: Sony EAN: 4905524419511 Feature: DVD recorder Label: Sony Legal Disclaimer: Layer One UK does not offer any warranty other than the one imposed by the manufacturer. Consequently, the warranty conditions proposed by Layer One UK will be an exact copy of the manufacturers. Manufacturer: Sony Model: RDRHXD870S.CEK Publisher: Sony Release Date: 2007-03-10 Studio: Sony
Features DVD recorder Freeview and Analogue Audio Dolby Digital / Dts Surround 160GB Gb hard disk capacity Recording format DVD-R/DVD-RW/DVD+R/DVD+RW
Accessories Logitech Harmony 1000 - Touch Screen Universal Remote Control Logitech Harmony 895 Remote Control Logitech Harmony 525 Advanced Universal Remote Control Logitech Harmony 785 Universal Remote Control Logitech Harmony 555 Universal Remote Control
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Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: Easy to use Comment: We bought this dvd a few weeks ago and I think it's great; it was easy to set up, use and you can watch a program at the same time you are recording. It is good value for money as it has a large memory. Customer Rating: Summary: Excellent Product - Better than buying Seperate boxes Comment: I've recently bought a whole string of new Audio and Video kit. This Sony box is by far the best of the lot!! It does everything with relative ease. Picking a program out of the EPG to record is easy, and adding series link isn't much harder either. Freeview image is excellent and much better than any i've used/owned before. DVD's are clear and upscalling the image is a bonus. I had a small doubt about the fact it only has 1 digi tuner, but believe me you can multi task still on the unit with ease. I often play something pre-recorded off the hdd whilst i'm recording another program. This works fine. Same is true with watching DVD's whilst recording. You do not have to do anything special to do these functions either, the Sony box just happily manages and multi tasks. You can record off your sky box easily too by picking the program out of the alternative EPG provided in the Sony. There's a little link tool in the box that makes this possible. Finally, Xvid and Divx files play perfectly and better than any unit I've used before. No skipping or lip-synch issues. I love this product!! prices vary on the Web, so shop around. Amazon is always a reliable vendor. Customer Rating: Summary: Good unit with one irritating flaw in the firmware. Comment: On the whole I am very pleased with this unit. Good points: Mostly does what it says on the tin. It has more features than I will ever use. The USB port on the front will even accept a keyboard for text entry when labelling titles and discs. This feature in NOT mentioned in the manual. When not fast copying the HDD and DVD drives are quiet. If you are copying stuff to keep, then you can record it to HDD, edit out the adverts and the start/finish announcements before burning it to DVD. Bad points: If you are using the remote control to enter text, the manual says that you can either select the letters on the screen or repeatedly press the number keys SMS style. It would be helpful to have the letters included in the legends on the remote control. I have my sky + box connected upstream of the recorder to the Line 1 input so that if I want to copy stuff across it makes use of the RGB output from the Sky box. Unfortunately this means that you cant watch the Sky box whilst recording from the built in Freeview tuner. It would be good if the Line 1 input could be passed through even when recording Freeview. (I don't have an HDMI input on my telly). I have found a `plug around' around solution to this problem, but it involved me having to purchase a SCART distribution amplifier (£30) and use 2 SCART inputs on my telly. If you want to record stuff using the AV inputs on the front then you can have any format as long as it is 4:3. A means of selecting 16:9 would be helpful. The Manual is appalling. It is so bad that even Sony miss understood one section when talking to me an the phone - more of which later. I am fortunate to have relevant engineering experience and background to assist me with setting up and using the kit, but I don't know how the average non techie who just wants to `plug and use' would cope. There appears to be a serous bug in the firmware. Fast dubbing between the HDD and DVD is fine. However, if the material on the HDD has been recorded at SP and you wish to copy more than 2 hours worth to a 4.7Gb DVD, then there is a problem with 16:9 material. 4:3 material copies across just fine but 16:9 material is copied across squashed into 4:3 format. To give Sony their due, they did respond to my message on their web site with a phone call to try and help. However the chap I spoke to told me that the it was due to `having to compress the material to make room on the disk'. I know for a fact that this is wrong particularly as I can work around the problem by loading the files from the DVD to my PC, modifying the WSS flags and then copying them back to DVD-r. I have tried further communication with Sony, but they seem reluctant to talk to me any more. I get the impression that they think I don't know what I am talking about. I am convinced that a modification to the firmware would sort the problem. You could argue that all I need to do is force my widescreen telly to display 16:9. However if you are replaying the discs on a 4:3 set then you don't have that option. I find the menus a bit clunky to use however I can put up with that. I see from the above that I have written more about the bad than the good. Will I be sending the unit back? No. Would I buy it again? If the Aspect ratio problem was sorted then defiantly yes. If not then I would certainly look elsewhere first. Customer Rating: Summary: Excellent machine, easy to use Comment: After buying and returning a similar spec Panasonic, I did a bit of research looking for players with the specs I wanted; digital tuner, upscaling, multi-region capability, fair size HDD, and found only four or five that met my requirements. Reviews on Amazon and elsewhere led me to this one, and I'm not at all disappointed. Some reviews said it was not that intuitive to use, but I've found it to be a piece of cake, both following on screen instructions and reading the manual, which to be fair, is rather large (even though I normally let my wife learn new stuff first and then teach me). Picture quality from DVDs and tuner is really good, pause live T.V function is a doddle and editing out ads and unwanted bits is really easy. Price wise from Amazon it is £40 quid cheaper than my local Sony dealer, and buying a remote multi-region unlocker from Ebay made that part simple and cheaper again than my Sony dealer doing it for me. The codes to unlock it are available online and are cheaper still. All in all an excellent buy from Amazon. Customer Rating: Summary: Good recorder let down by EPG Comment: This is a very good recorder let down by a fault in the EPG. Basically it's fine if you set it to record programs on the same day. However programs set more than 24 hours in advance can be lost. The good news is that apparantly (according to the pcadvisor website) Sony have a fix on CD-ROM. Call them on 0800-1695263. More Reviews
Editorial Reviews: DVD Recorder / Hard Disk Drive with Integrated Dual Digital and Analogue Tuner, 160GB capacity and series link recording function