Sony RDR-HXD870 - DVD Recorder With 160GB Hard Drive - With Freeview - Silver.
Sony RDR-HXD870 - DVD Recorder With 160GB Hard Drive - With Freeview - Silver.
HDD DVD RECORDER 160GB INT DIG TV TUNER HDMI OUTPUT IN
Customer Review: High Quality but with some limitations
This is an incredible machine for the money. It’s best trick is the DVD upscaling to 1080p through HDMI which has stopped me bothering about HD-DVD and Blu-Ray until the format war is over. On my 1080p capable Sony TV the picture quality is simply staggering - worth the asking price alone. Normal TV upscaling with less data to work with is less impressive but perfectly acceptable. Recording quality depends on your signal quality and compression - use HQ if you have the disc space.
Flexibility to edit TV recordings before transfer to TV (removing unwanted sections) is easy and the transfer quality is very good depending on the settings you use. When dubbing to DVD the HXD870 appears to be incapable of recording something else to HD (unlike when watching a recording or DVD at the same time which is fine).
It you look ahead a few days in the digital TV listings there can be a substantial delay in completing the full schedule - for some reason this data isn’t immediately available on the hard drive which seems an odd decision by Sony. This can be annoying when trying to schedule recordings, a procedure that is otherwise very simple.
I was disappointed that despite indications to the contrary your recorded TV and DVDs cannot be played back through the aerial. This is a simple pass through connection only - there is no channel to tune into like a VCR. It does feed a picture to HDMI and Scart outputs at the same time so you can use a separate modulator if a feed to a remote TV is wanted. Digital audio output is coax only.
If you ask a question through the Sony website, be prepared to wait. They get to it eventually but this service does not appear to have a high priority.
The limitations of the HXD870 only affect you when doing unusual things. As soon as you play a DVD at HD resolution you forgive it everything!
Customer Review: Wonderful box
The Sony RDR 870 is simple a wonderful piece of equipment once you are able to get it up and running. The documentation is easy to follow if only concerned about connecting Freeview or analogue/satellite. Trying to connect both is not explained and you are more or less left with trial and error and some pointers hidden in quite a sizeable document. Contacting Sony was a waste of time as no one appears to respond to your email*. As always Amazon did a great job in delivering on time and the equipment in one piece. Unlike a friends experience with Bt Shop were the whole process was a nightmare from beginning to end
*To update my review and to be fair to Sony, they made contact by telehone
and confirmed my connections to be correct. A bit late but at least they showed that they do care about customers.
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