Sanyo DVR-S300 Slim Line DVD Recorder
Sanyo DVR-S300 Slim Line DVD Recorder
Customer Review: Poor Player and very Loud
Ihave had this DVD player for 3 months and it has broken down the Lcd screen wont display anymore so it is impossible to turn on. It is also very noisy even when its not turned on the fan goes inside all the time and becomes annoying when trying to watch TV I eneded up turning it off at the mains when not using!!!!
However when you where using it the record quality was good and playback was good
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SONY DualLAYER DVD recorder recording on a 160Gb hard drive The RDR-HX725S features a 160 GB hard drive so you can record andenjoy all of your favorite TV programs on your schedule.
Used Price: ?148.23
Customer Review: Worst dvd recorder I have owned
I bought this to replace a Medion (Tevion) recorder bought from Aldi. I assumed wrongly that the Sony would be of higher quality. My experiences have been similar to those of other reviewers. The machine has always been impossibly slow, hard to use, and lacking in some obvious features. It has always needed re-booting regularly, and now it has decided to die completely, with the dreaded “HDD error” display. Of course, it is now 14 months old,and just out of the one year guarantee. I echo the advice of other contributors - don’t buy a Sony. I have had no trouble with my Panasonic dvd player,but I wonder now with PVRs and cable/satellite playback whether I need a dvd recorder at all. Very disappointing machine,and very poor value. As for support from Sony - a joke.
Customer Review: Sluggish, poorly thought-out and unreliable
I got my first one of these as a replacement for the Sony RDR-HX510, which broke down after a short time. I have to say I didn’t really like this model. Although it had a hard drive that was twice the size of my previous machine, the extra capacity seemed to have been provided at the expense of many of the features which made the RDR-HX510 so good. Gone was the full-screen edit facility, with the playback being in a much smaller screen within the main screen. The rest of the screen area was needlessly given over to dead space. There were other drawbacks: Gone was the x2 FF and RW option of the predecessor, which I very much liked, and used a lot. Now the first setting was 1.5. Not too bad a speed, but unfortunately rendered next to useless, because playback is not smooth. The predecessor when running in 2x FF would playback the recording at twice the speed, and ran smoothly, whilst also allowing you to hear the double-speed sound track. This was a lovely feature for the purpose of quickly, accurately and easily finding certain points in a recording. The new machine only played back at a slower x1.5 speed, and ‘jumped’ annoyingly every few frames or so as it did so, making the playback so jerky as to be unwatchable, if you don’t want to get a headache. NO RECORD PAUSE!!!!!!!!! Now this is the most bizarre of all the feature cuts made with this supposed upgrade. There was no REC PAUSE button anymore. Again, for the purpose of editing out adverts, this is a command very commonly used (you can’t use the REC STOP function, because this will then break up the programme into what the machine sees as entirely separate recordings, so that a movie for example would be cut up into as many as seven separate recordings, which of course don’t playback consecutively. Therefore, when making a direct recording, you would naturally use the REC PAUSE button at the start of the ad break. This is usually my preferred method of cutting out ads, rather than using the edit facility afterwards, as using the REC PAUSE button gives a seamless edit point in playback, with no momentary freeze, as with recordings edited later in edit mode. Timed recordings The set up for this function was the most complicated and least intuitive I have ever encountered on any television recording device. The menu was very hard to navigate, and when you had finally managed to set your recordings, not all the details were displayed for them on one screen, so it was very hard to go back and review your timer settings. Even after several weeks of using this machine, I could not get the hang of this feature to the point where I could set a timer without thinking about it (as I have been able to do with every other VCR and DVD recorder I’ve owned). In addition, overall the machine was very sluggish. Its response to the remote commander was painfully slow, so editing and titling was a time-consuming nightmare. Nevertheless, I persevered, not wanting the hassle of having to send back another machine. However, the decision was made for me when, after less than a fortnight, the unit developed a fault. While trying to record to the hard drive, I got an error code of C:13 and a message saying ‘The Disk is Dirty.’ Now sometimes you might expect to see that when recording or dubbing to a DISK, as the Sony machines seem to be hyper sensitive, and even brand new disks, straight off a spindle are occasionally inexplicably rejected, but to see this message relating to the device’s hard drive was obviously worrying. I deleted a few recordings from the hard drive, wondering if the fact that the hard drive was nearly full had anything to do with it, but it made no difference. Perversely, although the machine wouldn’t allow me to record anything new to the hard disk, it did let me dub programmes from the hard drive onto DVD disk. However, even this facility was short-lived, and soon it was dead altogether. I got a second one of these models from Hyper-Fi in October 2007. It lasted 17 days before developing the same fault, with the same error message ‘The Disk is dirty.’ This time it wouldn’t even let me salvage the recordings I’d made, as I just got the message ‘Cannot record to this disk’ if I put a blank DVD in. I thought I’d try switching off the unit and unplugging it, as this has occasionally worked with the numerous other faulty DVD recorders I have had from Sony. On this occasion however it just made a bad situation worse. This time when I switched the power back on, all that happened was that the message HDD ERROR appeared flashing in the display of the unit, and that was that. The machine was effectively dead. So this model is appallingly bad to use and equally unreliable. On the good side, Hyper-Fi were brilliant; with possibly the most speedy, efficient and friendly customer services I’ve had the pleasure to deal with. I say that here because the Amazon web site wouldn’t let me submit seller feedback for them for some reason. Bottom line: don’t buy ANY Sony DVD recorder. I’ve had NINE different machines in 18 months, and all have them have broken down within a short time. Of all of them, this was the worst. Get a Panasonic instead.
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Amazon Price: ?169.99
Customer Review: Could be better
In common with the other reviewers, the first thing I noticed was how noisy the fan is. Over the last few months the fan has been getting even noisier at start-up, but quitens a little after a few minutes. This problem is getting so bad I am about to send it back. The other issue is that I have never been able to record on the timer (either to HDD or DVD), either from my NTL or Freeview box. It works fine to record live though and I am happy with other aspects of it.
Customer Review: Absolute JUNK
I bought this based on the half decent reviews. The first unit I bought had a faulty LCD & had to be sent back (part of the LCD didn’t light up, meaning 18:00 hours always displayed as 8:00 etc). The second unit randomly freezes for no reason what all. At this point it becomes COMPLETELY unresponsive & the only fix is to unplug it & wait for one minute before powering back on. Nothing else works. In addition, it’s completely failed to record programs via the timer. The first & last time I buy anything from Daewoo. Avoid this junk at all costs.
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