Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony RDR-HXD870 - DVD Recorder With 160GB Hard Drive - With Freeview - Black

Just had 2 weeks playing and learning about this Recorder. Some thoughts as follows:

1)Bought from Avides(Germany)through Amazon. The packaging was absolutely hopeless with a large hole in one corner of the box. Thankfully the item was perfect inside. Saving almost £50 of the typical price.

2)Yes the manual is quite complex but so is the machine. Who would know more then 60% of what a modern PC can do? It pays to read the manual quite carefully.

3) As a recording machine it is very very good. I have no problems with the EPG. It functions very well.

4) The remote is a little fiddly with small buttons. I also have the Sony Bravia 32". The picture upscales to 1080i which is the maximum the Bravia can handle. If you try to force the 1080p resolution through the Bravia screen goes blank. The 1080i resolution is astonishing. Any old DVD is upscaled to 1080i through the HDMI connection. On the matter of the HDMI cable I can tell you here and now that the £0.51 cable works exactly the same as the £35.00 cables you can buy in the high street stores. The reason for saying this is that digital cables either work or they do not work - there is no in between. The signals carried are binary ie on or off. They are not subject to interference as analogue cables are. Gold connections make no difference to end quality of the picture. As I said they either work or they do not.

5) Back to the RDR-HDX870 - Having transitioned from a JVC S-VHS recorder
straight to this latest HDD technology I can truly say the the machine is simply awesome.

Quick delivery and a very good price. Well done Amazon.
I bought the HXD870 to replace my worn out Sony VCR.
My bravia HD-ready Sony TV is only 8 months old and so I had hoped for easy compatibility. (Easy being the essential word).
After many hours of frustration trying to set up my new purchase, I can now use the basics on the DVD recorder and the picture quality is brilliant. So much better than a VCR.

But oh dear the manual is an utter disgrace.

If you are expecting to carefully plod through the instructions, you will be sorely disappointed.
I have better things to do with my life than study the meaning of "dubbing" and "title list" and "hook up" and "smartlink" and so on.
To get any joy, I resorted to re-reading the TV manual (how come Sony can produce a decent TV manual and an awful DVD recorder manual ?)and then I began to grasp some of the things I needed to do. I then had to use my initiative to guess at how to carry out these things. OK for you guys with reasonable initiative, but I knew I was in big trouble when I realized I had to use MY initiative.
The manual is complex, it fails to give explanations for the basics AND it fails to give a good technical explanation. Useless, utterly useless.

This DVD recorder might turn out to be wonderful, but thats no use to me if I can not work out how to use the damn thing.

A big thank you goes to the other reviewers of this product and the customers discussions. Without your goodwill and efforts I would still be clueless as to how to even get a simple recording on this machine. Due to other reviewers, at least I was aware that I was likely to have trouble deciphering the manual.

If you are tempted to buy and your knowledge is limited to setting up a VCR then I recommend that you read up a great deal or you resign yourself to getting someone else to set up this recorder. If you have to resort to the latter, then I doubt that you will ever get to grips with the machine.

Some discussion points, with answers, for the less technically minded (like me!):
I would like to transfer my videos to DVD. Can this machine do this ?
Found out the hard way: Yes this machine will burn you a DVD BUT you need a good VCR before you can start to transfer a video(maybe obvious, but was not obvious to me) AND most videos are copy protected so you can not transfer them anyway!! I can accept this situation now that I know the facts. I have purchased a brand new VCR so that I can (a) copy the amateur videos and (b) still watch the commercially produced videos, but not using my HXD870.

By the way, yes you can watch one channel whilst recording another. But this assumes your TV has either a digibox or a built in tuner, which mine does have. And, due to the useless manual, it might take you four weeks to work out how to actually do this.
Now I know how to operate this part of the recorder, the procedure is in fact quick and easy.
Wonder if Sony would pay me vaste sums of money to write an idiots guide to using their HXD ???????

When we researched our Sony DVD Recorder,we were determined to cover all the options. I believe on reading all the reviews that we may have overlooked one of these. Am I right in thinking that when you are recording or have the timer on, that you cannot watch another channel on Freeview. We thought the recorder did have this facility and I have been scouring the manual to find out what we have done wrong. Looks like we may have to re-connect our old digibox.
Other than this we have found the Recorder excellent.

I actually have the RDR-HXD770 which is identical but with only 120gb hard drive.

Good all round machine. At first there was an issue where it would decide to randomly delete scheduled recordings. This was sorted out promptly with a firmware upgrade from sony.

The unit has excellent connectivity - Component, Composite, Svideo, SCART, HDMI etc. It also has upscaling for DVD playback - which is great if you have an HD TV.

The unit has been very reliable and has hardly ever missed a recording (and i've done plenty!) The high speed HDD->DVD DUB feature is also very handy.

There are a couple of small things (but dont let them put you off)

- Widescreen recordings are possible, and other DVD players recgonise them as such, just like you would buy a widescreen film DVD from a shop. However, this is only due to the IFO files telling DVD players to switch to widescreen. The VOB files are still in 4:3 format, which means if u rip them to your PC, it will only see them as 4:3. (so people will took tall / thin!)

- The user manual is not very good.

- The interface could be improved to make it more user friendly, though ot should be ok for most people.

- Guide listings can be slow to load.

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Firstly i spent a long time reviewing which dvd recorder to buy. my requirements were to replace my old dvd player, and to be able to easily record the odd episode of a soap or film, but also allowing upscaling to HDMI TV. This a great purchase and at a great price too.
Easy to setup, very easy to use simply browse the EPG a select what you want to watch or record. Easy to see review what you have recorded, and can delete when done.

However it does only have one freeview tuner which means you cant watch something else while recording, however my tv has its own built in tuner, so i can watch that - no problem.
Would recomend.

Easy to dub recording to DVD, no tried the video editing yet.
Menus are a little slow to display after pressing the button so only 4 stars. still a great buy. its amazing what i now find to record.