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.

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 did a lot of soul searching and research before opting for the RDR-HXD870. I can say now that I made the right choice, as for the money, this machine is hard to beat.

It does everything from recording to editing very well indeed, and is very easy to use. The all important picture quality is simply superb, and in the 4 months that I've had it has performed flawlessly.

Why did I not award it 5 stars? Well the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) is not the best although quite adequate. But the problem is it lags behind your remote presses, and means you keep shooting past your choices. Slow down your 'button bopping' to a snail pace and it's fine. Mildly anoying but I can live with it. Having said that though, the recording of programmes whether individually or a series (every week) are simply a doddle. You don't need to memorise how to do things either as the menus are easy to follow.

In operation, the unit is very quiet, no evidence of the noise issues I'd read on some reviews of earlier Sony models.

All in all highly recommended; especially when you consider the price. 4.5 stars would be a more realistic rating but I don't have the option.

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.

I used to have seperate freeview box (phillips) and a cheap dvd recorder. The freeview was great, apart from locking up now and again but the dvd recorder sub £60 was a chore to use, having to format dvd disks, then trying to get the player to read them usually meant missing at least the first 5 minutes of a program. Now i've got one of these and removed the other two machines from my cabinet and what a difference. For a start the machine itself is very well built, it feels solid compared to the other boxes I had, it's a bit bigger but definately feels like quality. It's also really easy to use, the remote is nice and simple and it's easy to set up. Took about 10 minutes from unpacking the box to scanning for the freeview channels before attempting my first pause of live tv, which worked perfectly. You can even rewind and fastforward while recording which is fun. You can also set up scheduled to record an entire series of programmes similar to Sky+. Overall an excellent buy and I just hope it will last for a few years.

Follow up: After a few days i've noticed freeview sticking on BBC and ITV channels, i've now gone back to my old phillips freeview box which works perfectly but still using this sony to record tv from the phillips freeview box. I'd give it 3 stars now because of the problems with the freeview hardware unless they bring out an upgrade to fix the problems it looks like i'll be stuck with an extra remote until I get Sky.