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

As far as I can make out there is only 4 different players like this that have Freeview and only two of these that play Divx Movies (internet downloads). The other is the Samsung which is £100 cheaper but does not seem to get many good reviews. I have bought this Sony HDD Recorder and love it. It does everything very easily and plays my Movie downloads so its a No brainer for me. The player has two EPG's! a digital one (which is actual the basic one) and an analogue Guide+ with its' large thumbnail screen in the corner so you can still see the picture when going through the TV Guide. Just hit the Red record Button for the program chosen- Job done- Brilliant! The 2 niggles I have is 1. Forget the User Manual except to connect it up - it's too long and overly complicated. Just have a go yourself as it's mostly common sense & good fun. Niggle 2. Like all the other HDD PVR's with Freeview they all only have 1 built in Tuner - so Sony have missed a trick here. This means you can watch a terrestrial (analogue) channel and record a Freeview channel, but not record and watch two separate Freeview channels unless connected up to your obselete Freeview box or better still an unused Skybox. This can provide other freeview channels and ones not included with the Sony's Freeview, its free but remember to keep the Skycard IN. So dig out your old Skybox and connect it up to your Sony!! Hope this is useful

I bought this to replace a separate freeview box and Dvd recorder and its a revalation! the manual was a little daunting at first but the setup was straightforward and after a bit of playing around, I found it simple to use. the remote was easy to programme to operate my basic TV functions, so now I have one remote instead of three - Brilliant. The EPG is simple and effective, and if you're in a hurry, you can start recording a programme that's on NOW without even turning the TV on, and when you do, the picture is superb - live TV or recordings. All in all its a great unit and a bargain at the price. The Amazon express delivery is great too - next morning as promised. Highly recommended.

This is an incredible machine for the money. It's best trick is the DVD upscaling to 1080p through HDMI which has stopped me bothering about HD-DVD and Blu-Ray until the format war is over. On my 1080p capable Sony TV the picture quality is simply staggering - worth the asking price alone. Normal TV upscaling with less data to work with is less impressive but perfectly acceptable. Recording quality depends on your signal quality and compression - use HQ if you have the disc space.
Flexibility to edit TV recordings before transfer to TV (removing unwanted sections) is easy and the transfer quality is very good depending on the settings you use. When dubbing to DVD the HXD870 appears to be incapable of recording something else to HD (unlike when watching a recording or DVD at the same time which is fine).
It you look ahead a few days in the digital TV listings there can be a substantial delay in completing the full schedule - for some reason this data isn't immediately available on the hard drive which seems an odd decision by Sony. This can be annoying when trying to schedule recordings, a procedure that is otherwise very simple.
I was disappointed that despite indications to the contrary your recorded TV and DVDs cannot be played back through the aerial. This is a simple pass through connection only - there is no channel to tune into like a VCR. It does feed a picture to HDMI and Scart outputs at the same time so you can use a separate modulator if a feed to a remote TV is wanted. Digital audio output is coax only.
If you ask a question through the Sony website, be prepared to wait. They get to it eventually but this service does not appear to have a high priority.
The limitations of the HXD870 only affect you when doing unusual things. As soon as you play a DVD at HD resolution you forgive it everything!

The EPG lets down what is otherwise a very good machine. It does not continue to show the current channel in a window (with audio) when you channel surf using the EPG, nor does it give the program detail when the program is selected- you have to press the info button. ALL these features were on my 4 year old Grundig set top box, which I still prefer to use.
On a more positive note, getting it to record is a straightforward affair. The Sony does not require you switch to a standby mode to record, unlike the Panasonic DVD recorder which it replaced. This beligerently prevented you from operating basic features (like putting in a DVD to play) whenever it was programed to record anything.
Whilst the noise of the SONY is not audible when watching TV you will not want to leave it on standby when reading a book in the same room.
Despite these adverse comments it's still probably the best DVD/PVR you can get at the moment.

This review is based after 48 hours of usage. Good build quality, smart case and lights can be turned off. Good quality digital freeview recorder (although oddly possibly not quite as good as the Sony TV). Quality of HDD recording and transfer/dubbing to DVD is very good. Integrated with digital EPG and has series record feature so even if programmes are moved it will still record them. No problem transferring HQ 16:9 from Hard disk to DVD-RW despite reports otherwise, but the manual indicates there are issues with lower quality recordings and DVD+RW. USB copying and reading is okay but bit of a gimic, will only transfer jpegs and mp3 so no copying of divx or mpeg (and no rename function I can find, so no copy and rename)however will play Divx from Data DVD or USB (haven't tried so can't comment on quality) but not mpg. Great features like the ability to edit and crop films on the hard disk. Even defrag and format functionality, the later suggesting you can replace the hard drive. HDMI connection (but no cable supplied) Up scaling to 720p is superb, noticeably better than a Toshiba SD-360.

However, after all these good things there is the user interface which is poor to dreadful, I'm a tech-head and it took me a good hour to get it to show 4:3 DVDs in letterbox mode. The EPG guide is very poorly rendered on screen and frustratingly awkward to navigate, setting a recording is as bad as old fashion video recorders, there is no consistency with the interface and functions are hidden away, Vistas media centre or Apple TV are miles better. The English manual has 172 pages which says it all. I hope its a Linux kernel underneath which can be upgraded (there is an upgrade function) so hopefully we will see a dramatically improved interface. it seems odd that a company that can produce the smart interface on the PSP could make such a mess of this.

So great product, great features, if you like fiddling with technology go ahead and buy one but if you want a simple to use box, think carefully.

Since writing this review its become obvious that there is a software issue with the RDR-HXD ranges freeview EPG, it has a nasty habit of not recording EPG linked programs and actually wiping EPG timers not yet recorded. This can be easily rectified by seting the times manually which can be automatically set in the EPG. However that does mean that series recording won't work reliably neither will the sustem reliably adjust times for early or late programmes. At the moment Sony are publicly refusing to acknowledge this is a software error and there help desk suggest this is a hard disk fault and machines should be returned. Sorry sony but this is just silly everyones hard disk are only failing in the exact physical location where the epg info (which is probably randomly located anyway) is stored, but all other data written to the hard disk is fine. This is clearly a software fault but as the system can be upgraded over the air it shouldn't be a problem to fix it.