Hi - Im looking to buy a DVD recorder with a built in freeview reciever. Ideally I would like something that also has a built in HDD, but do not want to spend more than £300 or so.

What options would people recommend?

Robert

I have a Sony RDR-HXD 910. It is superb. It also has HDMI output for HD viewing.

If the 910 is too expensive then the 710 and 510 have excellent reviews.

Dave

I would agree with the comments above made by David Pateman.

Best of luck in your search.

Trevor.

I don't think you have a lot of choice in this area. My personal view is that manufacturers want to eek out as much money from us poor consumers as possible by providing DVD/Freeview recorders, HDD/Freeview recorders or even HDD/DVD recorders but not all three in one box.

I had been waiting for these for several years now and I thought Sony was the only player. However, it has been pointed out to me in another thread that Panasonic also have a model out - the DMR-EH60 (approx £400). I believe that the Sony RDR-HX510S mentioned above does NOT have an integrated digital tuner.

Therefore, I urge manufactures again - stop screwing us and give us what we want.

Chris

Thanks for all your comments. Sadly I am inclined to agree with Chris on this one. There seems to be nothing out there (costing less than £400) that has DVD recorder, HDD and a digital tuner.

Particularly ironic when you look at the £100 price jump on some models, just to get a digital tuner built in (when £30 would get you one in a separate box).

Seems like manufacturers are missing out on a key product at a key price point...

Robert

If you look online (Price runner, Kelkoo etc) you can get a Sony RDR-HXD710 for less than £400. This has DVD recorder, 160GB Hard disk and DVB Tuner.

The deals are out there!

Dave

If you are prepared to go £79-17 over your '£300 or so'budget, the Sony RDR-HXD 710 can be bpurchased from www.pricerunner.co.uk at the moment.There may even be better deals out there.For only £379-17, you would have a quality machine that meets your requirements and also one which appears to win most of the awards.If Sony is not your scene, then I am sure other makes could be obtained for similar or even less by shopping around. As I said before, best of luck in your search - part of the enjoyment is in the choosing.
Regards,
Trevor.

> If Sony is not your scene, then I am
> sure other makes could be obtained for
> similar or even less by shopping around.

This is exactly what I was saying - there simply don't appear to be many make out there. Instead manufacturers are content to continually push other types of machine at us. These machines SHOULD have been available years ago - there is no technical reason why they couldn't. The only reason that I can think of is that manufacturers where make too much money from other types of recorders and so a have waited and waited so they can get everyone to buy again a few years later.

I think there’s a big conspiracy myself.

I don't know about conspiracy - isn't it just down to economics ? As far as I know only the UK uses Freeview, so any product including Freeview wouldn't be able to be sold in Europe, America, Far East etc. so the product development costs would have to be recovered from the relatively small UK market.

doesn't freeview use standard DVB-T transmisions? i.e the tuner used would be virtually identical to other digital terestrial signals in other markets.

DVB is only in europe - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB

- and then this is only terrestial, the only good thing about this is its free... it is prone to interference, availability, and lack of bandwidth...

cable and sattelite beat this on almost everything - you dont get something for nothing..

and of course, most companies think 'the world view' - it is easy enough to make a chip with different standards, but a whole tuning unit is a bit more expensive, when europe is a small part of the world...

and besides, do you want to make do with the cheap integrated DVB, when you could buy a *quality* reciever, with good connections, and the possibility of 'pay per view' in the future??

Foneman I think you need to look at a few things more closely. DVB is a digital transmission medium. There are three flavours - DVB-T, DVB-C and DVB-S - no prizes for guessing they refer to Terestrial, Cable and Satelite.

Freeview uses DVB-T. This is why you will get DVB-T cards for the PC to recieve freeview. NTL and telewest use DVB-C and Sky uses DVB-S. It's pretty much standard everywhere. Of course DVB-S and DVB-C cards are also avliable.

This medium doesn't take into account encryption methods so simply using a DVB-S card in a PC to recieve Sky wont work, but in essence the transmission mediums are the same.

In fact the wiki pages you mention actually give the adoption maps for DVB - see section 6. In fact, the UK was one of the first trialists and adopters of DVB-T services - in the form of OnDigital, now Freeview.

North America seems to favour ATSC for terrestrial digital transmission, but the rest of the world seems to favour DVB-T.

DVB-S and DVB-C is almost universally accepted.

In addition, the DVB standard sets out the mechanisms for CAM's etc, and return paths. This applies to ALL DVB formats, without the return path, how do you think interactivity will perform. Pay per view and Video on Demand (VOD) are nothing more than an interactive service.

In the UK this PPV/VOD on terrestrial is not really possible at the moment due to bandwidth issues - hence only the small amount of stations available. As analogue is kicked into touch, so the airwave space will be freed and more channels could be adopted. Whether we will see true VOD via terrestrial digital remain to be seen, but certain PPV channels I'm sure will be available.

Therefore, there is still no reason why manufacturers should be screwing us over with regards to HDD/DVD/Freeview records!

of course the problem with freeview, etc, is that it does not make that much money for the companies transmitting on it...

the uptake is very small compared to cable and SKY, who have giant budgets, to attract big advertisers, so can afford lots of publicity...

I have heard about a system to get round the bandwidth problem - a program is 'downloaded' to the box over a few hours, so it can then be shown in high quality!!

seriously, if you did a job for no pay, how much effort would you put in??? The bills wont pay themslves...

This is a vicious circle. The uptake is not that great because manufacturers are STILL producing new equipment with analogue tuners. Then manufacturers say “well why should we sell kit for services no one is watching”.

The problem I have had for many years now is that the government set a deadline to switch to digital broadcast originally in 2008 – I think this has slipped to 2012 now. However, I find it highly irregular that manufacturers have been very slow to implement digital tuners in ALL new AV kit that is being sold. It really isn’t that much of a deal and the hardware cost should not increase too much. The government could also “lean” on manufacturer to produce such equipment otherwise even the 2012 deadline looks unlikely.

The majority of people still do not understand that equipment they are buying could essentially be out of date very quickly. This is why I believe manufacturers have been slow to produce such boxes. They can essentially sell more units as people have to replace their old devices with analogue tuners with new devices with digital tuners.

Therefore, I still haven’t heard a convincing argument as to why manufacturers have been so slow to produce a DVD/HDD/Digital tuner unit.

yes, there are too many people out there that just don't want to risk it...

I could state a few examples.. did you know that almost *no* car manufacturer wanted to fit seatbelts, before it was made compulsory, with a fine?? - and how many of you belted up, before the penalty came into force??? It was even worse in the USA...

Another example, was when 20K was a fast internet speed... a lot of companies came out with their own way of increasing speed - I think there was 4 or 5 methods, each that needed special hardware at the exchange...

the crunch was, it was found difficult to sell a large number of these units, due to customer confusion and dissatisfaction of the prices involved... a lot of money was lost, before they stopped arguing, and agreed on one standard...

I think this must be the reason behind all the inertia... -and of course, there is *even less* cash and 'paying customers' today, they all want something for nothing!!

and what percentage of the world does europe take up?? 20%? I think most companies would go for the 100% chance of selling more units, unless they have giant pockets, like sony...

so we are back to the usual, wait for the time when it is *needed* - headlines in the paper like 'internet running out of capacity' 'telephone numbers running out' etc, etc...

believe it or not, there are places that *still* dont have anything faster than dialup!! yes, even in USA!!!

Hi Everyone,
I've recently purchased a Sony Digibox.I can't remember it's model no. but it was £77.21 from digimania or something like that and it's great ! Anyway, I'd now like a DVD recorder that has hard disk memory and the ability to pause live tv and also talk to my digibox and make recording easy (ie program the recordings through the recorder which will automatically record once the program starts) Has anyone got any recommendations ? (I'd also like to spend as little as possible!)
I'd really appreciate some help

well, there is a more active forum here.. http://www.avforums.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=113

It is very useful to search this, to avoid getting a bad deal...

Most new DVDRs will 'pause live tv' (simultaneous recording and playback)
- toshiba calls it 'timeslip'
- pioneer calls it 'Chase playback'
- sony calls it 'TV pause'
- panasonic calls it 'chasing play' but the button is called 'timeslip'

These are the top models, but the toshiba is looking very dated now (takes 50 secs to start, etc..)

and seriously, dont think of how cheap you can get it - you will pay for this in bad recording, lack of functions,
and just replacing 'search for an empty VHS' with 'search for an empty DVD or Hard Disc space'...

I think £300 is a *start* not a finish - unless you want to get a cheap one that will only last a year!!

Thanks Foneman, I'll check that forum out.
Thanks for the advice