Home > Consumer Reviews > Hama SCART Switch Box AV-100S

This little box is amazing! I couldn't get all my electronic equipment to talk to each other and I desperately wanted to get my treasured holiday videos recorded onto DVD. Others had recommended all sorts of gadgets and contraptions and I tried and tried without any success. Then I found this switch box. It's easy to use, easy to set up and I have my TV, video and satellite box all talking to the DVD recorder with excellent picture reception. All my videos are now safely transferred to DVD and, as a surprising bonus, the switch box improved the picture quality of some of my old videos from some of our very early holidays! This box is a real treasure and worth its weight in gold!

I use this great litle box to feed my DVD, Game Cube and trusty Dreamcast into my TV - roughly half of my living room electronics handled very nicely indeed. It saves lot of plugging and unplugging which would wear down the SCART connectors and make them very fragile. For this price you really can't go wrong.

This is not a review of the item per se - I'm sure it's very good at its intended purpose, once I connect everything up. It is a reaction against the dubious sales policies of some of these Marketplace resellers, coupled with a justifiable moan against Amazon's postage pricing for electronic items. The reseller involved - they all must be the same - sells its wares under Amazon's main banner of a brand name. You're interested in this particular item, because you've read the good reviews, and the price is reasonable. Right? WRONG!! Trouble is, you'll probably get a generic copy at worst, or, at best - as in this case - a claim that the item is made at the same factory that makes Hama and Philips accessories, and is sold off in bulk. Thus you're paying for an unbranded item which doesn't look anything like Amazon's depiction. My advice, in hindsight, is to save yourself a packet i.e. most of the iniquitous £4-50 postage charge, and get exactly the same unbranded item from Argos for £9-99 which I've just seen (too late).

By the way, I was also interested in the "Hama" scart to connect this box to my TV. Same problem - cheap price, expensive postage, dubious genetics. I e-mailed all these cheap Marketplace guys to verify that the item was actually a "Hama" item i.e. to match the glowing reviews, and received a nil response from all 4. Draw your own conclusions...