Sony RDRHXD970 - 250GB Hard Drive DVD Recorder

Sony RDRHXD970 - 250GB Hard Drive DVD Recorder
Full-featured DVD Recorder / Hard Disk Drive with Integrated Dual Digital and Analogue Tuner, 250GB capacity and photo and music management features.
Amazon Price: ?272.80
Used Price: ?600.00
Customer Review: Not quite perfect
Contrary to some posts I found this very easy to set up, perhaps because I bought a Sony TV at the same time. Picture quality is excellent and the whole system is easy to use. The hard drive is enormous and I would estimate that you could store 100 - 120 programmes on it at any one time. The EPG is a great feature BUT there is an design fault which means the system will often wipe the setting within 24 hours of it being set. There is nothing as frustrating as a DVD recorder which doesn’t record what you have set it to record. I have subsequently found out that many other people have had the same problem. There ere numerous internet sites which show that consumers have been having this problem for many months but that Sony have denied that there is a problem. I have had an email from Sony today in which they admit that there IS a problem and they are working to fix it - so there’s light at the end of the tunnel. If they fixed this then this machine would be perfect and excellent value for money.
Customer Review: Life-changing (almost…)
We bought this Sony HDD recorder because we were sick of having video recorder, DVD player and Freeview box stacked underneath our TV. This machine replaces them all (well, my wife still insists on keeping the video recorder so she can watch her old VHS tapes, but…). The best feature is one that users of Tivo or Sky+ are well used to: recording a programme (or a whole series) onto hard drive just by clicking the programme’s title in the onscreen TV guide. The convenience of this cannot be overstated. No more hunting around for tapes or wondering if you’ve taped over your wife’s precious copy of last week’s Trinny & Susannah. Click the Title List button and all the programmes you’ve taped are displayed for immediate viewing, along with animated thumbnails of scenes from the programmes, like on a DVD menu. Recording onto DVD is another bonus if you want to keep your programmes, or lend them to others. I haven’t tried the “pause live TV” feature and one reviewer below suggests it’s not all that brilliant. I also don’t know about playing AVI files from the computer and I suspect this is a feature most of us won’t use. One caveat I have discovered is that you can’t tape one channel and watch another. This is a significant problem, meaning that effectively the recorder is only good for taping if you’re out or not watching TV. Otherwise we’ve been restricted to using the analogue tuner on our TV to watch one of the terrestrial channels. If you wanted to watch one digital channel and tape another, you’d be sunk. I suppose the only way around this would be if you had a digital tuner built into your TV, but as we’re using an analogue TV and watching all our digital through the AV channel, then we’ll have to wait, and hope they don’t turn off the analogue signal in our area for a few years.

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