TVonics DTR-Z500HD Freeview HD DVR

Back in October 2010, Reg Hardware looked at TVonics’ first Freeview HD recorder, the curiously styled DTR-HD500. The DTR-Z500HD is a more conventional 'shoe box' shape, though much smaller than many of the others I’ve looked at, but it once again packs in a good spec. TVonics DTR-HD500 DTR-Z500HD: a more sober design than …

[Richard Taylor 2]

Having

had one of the original boxes it has been generally good BUT - 23 months in, a new remote control required (buttons simply stop working), it has a bad habit of rebooting (on one exceptional evening, every 5 minutes), and occasionally decides that it will not record from a given channel and needs to be completely reset - that is a complete disk wipe! - to get going again

[Anonymous Coward]

That looks really rather nice ...

shame they don't do freesat ones ...

[Tom Wood]

Designed *and manufactured* in the UK

...crikey!

[jason 7]

Not quite.

Seems to me like it needs another couple of months development.

Possibly rushed to try to meet the Royal wedding deadline perhaps?

Lot of cash for me to spend on a 75% finished product.

I'll wait and see what else passes by. I've got till November this year before we go HD.

[kevin-au]

Fast forward/rewind speeds

I am interested in the DTR-Z500HD, but I am concerned about the fast forward/rewind speeds. The manual lists three speeds:

- Fast forward (speed not specified)

- 16 x

- 128 x

Did you experience the 128 x speed? Is it usable? On my current PVR (soon to be replaced) the top speed is 32 x, and I think I could cope with 64 x, but 128 x seems too fast.

Thanks

[zaax]

Doesn't deserve 50% let alone 75%

'If you’re hoping for media playback from the USB ports, you’ll be disappointed'. No media playback on the USB ports makes this already dated.

Also i wonder how big the mute button is on the remote - they make one of the most used buttons one of the smallest.

[Chris D Rogers]

My iMac does a lot more than this

I purchased an iMac and Digital TV USB clip for my family last Xmas and it does a lot more than this - probably cheaper to get a Mac Mini in my opinion.

[Chz]

Getting squeezed out of the market

And for twice the price, you can buy a whole new 40" television that does most of that (except record one thing and watch another - yet to see a dual tuner TV). It's just not worth that price to most people. The component costs are quite low, so I imagine it's mostly profit to them.

[Nigel Whitfield.]

Update, errata

A couple of points; a mistake I made (mea culpa) - there is an EPG search; it's just not immediately obvious.

Fast forward is tolerable at the highest speed, though you do get some of macro-blocking. There are other options worth using too, though. First, there's resume playback, so you can jump back to where you were. And the same screen allows you to enter a number of minutes to jump to and then start playback. Finally, there are the skip buttons; admittedly they are limited in duration, but the combination of those will likely cover most common needs.

As for the score, I think it does deserve the figure it got; we do have a standard way of calculating the ratings for RegHardware. Essentially, this doesn't offer as much as the Humax, but it does provide features (notably Dolby Transcoding) that are missing from some of the others I've looked at.

It's got a pretty straightforward interface that should be simple for most people to grasp (even if they don't find the EPG search), but lacks some of the extras found on, for instance, the Digital Stream or IceCrypt boxes.

[David Gosnell]

Reliability

Have you been using it long enough to have a handle on its reliability? As you know, just about every box out there seems to suffer mystery missed recordings, library disappearance, resets to defaults, loss of record list etc - but often only manifesting after a few weeks' use. Any confidence at this point that this is any better than the field?

Knowing the search function is in there could just tip in its favour if the dependability was there.

[Nigel Whitfield.]

Perhaps

It's been sitting here for around a month or so now, and I've not had any mysterious things happening (or at least none that I can't put down to other causes; for example, watching a recording of The Event from C4HD last night, one segment had the audio messed up, with no dialogue, but I've seen that happen on 4HD with other recorders too - seems they don't always switch back from stereo to 5 channels after the ad breaks properly).

So, I'd give a qualified yes, and it was happy even at the end of the chain of devices connected to my aerial, where other boxes have suffered failed recordings due to low signal.

It'll be interesting to see how HD boxes fare over the summer, with any tropo lifts, together with the increased power on digital muxes around the country as switchover proceeds.