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Reader review
User: carlem (profile) 
Location:
Date Posted: 2 September 2007
Review: I recently moved house and decided to take the opportunity to stop donating £30-odd per month to Sky. Having all these extra channels sounded great when I signed up, but I didn't really find many programmes on them that I wanted to watch, and many of them are available on Freeview anyway. My wife did spend a fair amount time watching rubbish on Living TV and the Hallmark channel, but I reckoned that was another good reason to get rid of Sky! However, I had become rather dependent on Sky+, so I was going to have to find a good Freeview PVR if I was going to ditch Sky.
I did some research on the web and decided to buy a Daewoo model (Daewoo DSD9503T, £129.99 from Amazon). From the spec and the reviews, this model appeared to tick all the boxes in terms of what I wanted (twin tuners, large disk capacity (160GB), and reasonable price). And when I first started using it, I was particularly impressed by the EPG - it splits the screen into three sections: the bottom half has the usual channel browser view, the top left shows a description of the programme currently showing on the selected channel, and in the top right shows a reduced size view of the selected channel. Very slick.
However, once I'd been using the Daewoo for a few days, there were a few things that I didn't like about it. The unit was quite noisy (resonance more than fan noise), and the remote control was very fiddly. More importantly, it was missing what I consider to be a crucial feature of PVRs -- the ability to rewind live television. I found this to be one of the most useful features of Sky+ -- the box automatically records whatever you're currently watching (up to the last two hours or until you change channel), so if you didn't catch what someone said or you want to see that explosion again, then you just rewind. Amazingly though, despite a host of other advanced features, you couldn't do this with the Daewoo. You could actually achieve the same thing if you remembered to press the timeshift button and then the play button every single time after you change channel, but who's going to do that? A pity, because it seems like it wouldn't have taken much effort to add this feature to the system. The final issue with the Daewoo was that it did tend to freeze up quite often (i.e. as if you had paused), whether recording or not. In these cases, you'd have to change channel or do a power off/on to get it working again. For this reason, I returned the Daewoo to Amazon for a refund. If it hadn't been for the lack of live rewind, I might have got a replacement unit instead.
So, I did some more reading up on the web and this time decided to go for a TVonics DVR-FP250 (£189.99 from www.tvonics.com). As far I can see from the specs, this is exactly the same as the FP150, but with a larger hard disk. Fortunately, the TVonics box has the all important live rewind feature that was missing from the Daewoo. Another major plus point is the remote control, which is much better quality than the Daewoo remote and very similar to the Sky+ remote, and like the Sky+ one, you can program it to control your TV (i.e. volume, mute, on/off etc). You can also use it to control your DVD player, which I don't think you could do with Sky+. It is also very compact and stylish looking, and very quiet. One other advantage, if you have young children, is that there are no buttons at all on the front of the unit, so you don't have to keep changing the channel back to what you were watching after they've randomly pressed all the buttons on the box!
On the downside, the EPG is relatively basic compared to the Daewoo (i.e. just a simple channel browser), and the colour scheme for the EPG is horrible -- bright greens and yellow. More significantly, although it has a twin tuner, you can only use the recording features on a single tuner. So, you can watch one programme while recording another, but you can't record two programmes at once, nor can you use the pause or rewind features while recording another programme. This is a bit of a disappointment as these features are supported by both the Daewoo and Sky+. One other slightly annoying issue is that when the box is switched on, it doesn't seem to automatically send a signal to the TV to switch to the relevant AV channel (most DVD players and set-top boxes will do this), so you have to press a couple of extra buttons when you switch on. Finally, I have noticed that after fast-forwarding through adverts, the video and audio are sometimes out of synch with each other. If you hit pause then play again, they seem to synch up. Not sure if this is a fault with my unit or a more general problem.
In summary, none of these three PVRs are perfect. In terms of the product, I would say that Sky+ is probably still better overall than either the Daewoo or the TVonics. However, if like me, you're happy with the choice of channels on Freeview and you don't want to be paying out money to Sky every month for the rest of your life, then the Tvonics is a good proposition.
Pros: * Live rewind and pause
* Twin tuner (watch one channel while recording another)
* Remote control can be programmed to operate TV and DVD player.
* Large capacity hard disk.
* No monthly subscription (vs. Sky)
* Compact, stylish unit.
* Quiet
Cons: * Cannot record two programmes at once or pause/rewind while recording another programme.
* Basic EPG with bad colour scheme
* Video/audio can get out of synch after timeshifting
Score: 7/10
Rating: 3 people have rated this review helpful
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Reader review
User: BigEric (profile) 
Location:
Date Posted: 27 April 2007
Review: I have now owned this gadget for for weeks and I really couldn't forsee life without it! Prior to purchase, I felt that television was degenerating, but now I can record all the early-morning re-runs of shows I enjoy (like Frasier) and then watch them in the evening instead of stuff like premier league football! Obviously, this is a very strange plu-point, but when you link it to watching Deal or No Deal at three times the speed (which I think is about spot-on) and skimming through all the adverts... What can I say? except Tesco are now selling this wee beastie at £40 off. Bargain !!!
Pros: Quite easy to operate, very quiet, super quality. My Son-In-Law has a PVR that could keep the entire street awake with its noise in the small hours. My machine is as near to silent as makes no difference. I love it.
Cons: Occasionally, too much button-pressing on the remote throws the box into confusion. I "cure" this by pulling the plug out and re-connecting five seconds later. This seems a small price to pay for all the benefits this small, beautiful black box has to offer
Score: 8/10
Rating: 2 people have rated this review helpful
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Reader review
User: maffyoo (profile)
Location:
Date Posted: 17 December 2006
Review: i agree with some of the key points in the main review but can't help thinking that the comments about "high quality channels" on sky are a bit wide of the mark. There are some things that i would go out of my way to see but the movies channels were never watched and there are a few days in the week where sky just had "nothing on". The blockbuster US series such as Lost and 24 are available before they air in the uk if you really want to see them and the rest is frankly just rubbish (Sky three is available on freeview now anyway). crap in HD is still crap...
Im pretty sure most people in the uk will still watch 80% of their tv on the traditional terrestrial channels and once i read the reviews on this PVR is wasnt difficult to decide to cancel my sky subscription and we havent looked back. admittedly the sky plus features such as auto recording of series are missed a bit but it only requires 5 minutes a week to get round them and the pvr does have a facility to record at the same time every week which will suffice 99% of the time.
I occasionally miss a sky only channel but a quick visit to usenet sorts that out and i can watch the football with a beer in my local across the road. For anyone battling with the "sky is too much and there's never anything on" decision, i'd say seriously consider this. its a very nice piece of kit, also we are in a marginal signal area but have had no problems with reception at all. its also easy to set up and perhaps something not picked up in the original review is just how good the recordings are.
Pros: Easy to set up
Quality of recordings is excellent as good as live tv
Well designed menus and control
looks nice
Designed by ex-sony engineers and their experience shows
huge disk capacity
No subscription (apart from license fee)
Cons: cancelling a sky subscription is not for the faint hearted
No auto recording like sky plus
Fewer channels than sky
Score: 8/10
Rating: 28 people have rated this review helpful
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