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

When I purchased a Sony TV from Amazon this came as a free offer.

Its great, the DVD player is very good, quality is excellent, I can't say I can notice a massive improvement via the HDMI (HD cable) upscaling, but its still a lot better than my old Sony DVD.

What make's this special is the Freeview tuner and built in Hard drive, I have had a couple of the Thomson Freeview boxes with hard drives which were good, but the Sony is so much better, the picture used to always drop out with the Thomson, It's a rare thing with the Sony, which means It has a better tuner.
It's also got a large storage capacity, where as I was always deleting on the Thomson to make more space.
Very easy to use, all you do is select the menu, (which is like the teletext menu), select the program you want to record, press the red button and that's it, It will start recording when the program starts, how I ever managed with a video recorder?
It's not the cheapest DVD player, but would give it a consideration, If I need to buy another I would not hesitate.

Having played with this gadget for a few weeks now we really can't fault it. Programming from either the Analogue or Digital EPG is incredibly easy. Likewise instant recording and finding what you've recorded to playback is a piece of cake. I've used the editing facilities extensively to copy our old collection of VCR tapes - it's very intuitive and performs all basic functions well. I've only needed to refer to the manual for a couple of things and even that is easy to understand.
It certainly does everything we want it to, so if you've only ever used a VCR and a separate Freeview box you're in for a very pleasant surprise.

Delivered promptly. The functionality took a little while to get used to (there are lots of nuggets of information in the various notes sections in the manual) but the performance is impressive. There was initially some confusion in that although although the tuner is dual channel, that means one analogue and one digital: if you are recording a Freeview channel that is not also an analogue one, you cannot view another Freeview channel until that recording has finished. The only fix is to have another Freeview box connected to (or already built in) the TV.

I bought this at the same time as getting a new Sony D series 32" and it does the job really well. Great picture quality (about 35 hours at full quality on the hard disc) and upscaling picture quality from DVD's is impressive. The programming interface isn't as good as Sky+, but it's quite usable and fairly straight forward. All in all I think it's very good value for money and I'm pleased I bought it. Of course what we all want to know is how reliable it is and I'm hoping that as it's a Sony it will last at least 5 years (like my ex-VCR did). Fingers crossed then!

I design electronic equipment for a living, so I like to think I am fairly up on the latest techno-speak. However am I the only one to think this bit of kit has a 'really bad' manual!!?

It actually took me quite a few hours to setup, (I am using a Sony Bravia 37" LCD), I decided to use an HDMI connection, but you still neeed to use a scart cable with it, in order to turn the HDMI on, doh! ... Sony to Sony - it ought to be so simple....

After running through the 'easy setup' mode. I found that the EPG didn't appear unless I rescanned the freeview channels again, seems odd that you have to scan the channels twice to get the digial epg..

Anyway, once its setup its fine, though the epg is visually a little different to the one on the Sony LCD TV's there is also not so much space for the program names, so you end up seeing 'The day ....' instead of The day of the Jeckal, which is fine once you get used to it.

I would only reccomend it if you have a free view TV as you will at some point want to record something and watch something else!

It's a good bit of kit, once you decipher the dreadful instructions, nothing is ever perfect, I'd still reccomend it over anything else out there, especially if you have a Sony TV.