Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony RDR-HXD890 Freeview+ 160GB Hard Disc Drive DVD Recorder - Black

I've had this a week now and can honestly say I am very impressed overall. I bought it to replace an ageing Phillips freeview box that was prone to freezing and losing channels linked to a Panasonic DVD recorder. For the price I paid (£165ish) I can highly recommend this Sony product. It is very quiet indeed, responds quickly to commands and gives a superb Freeview and DVD picture. I admit that the manual is long and not the most readable but basic functions like channel selection/recording to HDD or DVD/playing DVD's are very straight-forward. I have yet to try upscaling DVD's and am awaiting an HDFury HDMI to VGA lead to convert my old Hitachi plasma to high definition. Sound levels are lower than through the analogue tuner. There is no optical out so I've used the Coaxial output to connect to my Denon receiver. Dolby 5.1 and DTS are supported though there is no onboard decoder. So far I've tried the Incredibles and Neil Young 'Heart of Gold' concert film which were excellent. To sum up - This is a very well priced and capable piece of kit. Well done Sony and Amazon for the keen pricing (free delivery too - took just 3 days).
Update......November 2nd
I have now got the HDfury blue and HDMI to DVI lead so have been able to try upscaling DVD's with the Sony box. I have a 5yr old Hitachi plasma that according to Hitachi is not HD compatible. I know it has more than enough pixels so did some research on the internet. The HDfury plugs into the vga socket and is linked to the Sony box via an HDMI to DVI lead (£1 at Woolies). It is important to unplug the scart lead from the Sony box before switching on so it detects the HDMI link. Then you simply go into the system menu select 'basic set up' scroll to HDMI and from there select your desired resolution. I've chosen the highest 1920 X 1080i. The results are incredible!!! So far I've tested Star Wars episode 3. The colours and details awesome. There is no sound link through the Fury so I use the coaxial to Denon receiver. Now I'd like to award the Sony 6 stars because I have just revamped my entire DVD collection!!

I have been using a Sony RDR-HXD890 for two months or so. Whilst the manual made the set-up seem complicated, in practice it was straightforward for my purposes (an aerial to the digital tuner, a sat receiver to the SCART, and an HDMI connection to the TV).

Since receiving the unit, I have used it every day, for recording, playback, listening to mp3s and watching DVDs. I have no complaints about ease of use as the unit does everything I want it to do quickly and without fuss. Setting up a recording - whether manually or via the Freeview EPG - is easy enough.

Picture quality is, of course, subjective. I am not a technical person so can only say that I am more than satisfied with the picture quality of playback of recordings which I have made (in SP).

It is possible to play a recorded title whilst recording, including the program currently being recorded. You can also watch a DVD while recording to the hard-disk though it might be worth noting that if you are recording a PAL source then you cannot watch an NTSC disc.

A benefit is the ability to edit out adverts from films before high-speed transfer to DVD. This has also been handy for editing camcorder footage but I should point out that my requirements here are basic - I simply want to remove the shaky bits.

The Music Jukebox is very useful - I have transferred in excess of seven hundred mp3 tracks to the hard disk and use it every day for playback.

All told, I am very happy with the Sony HXD890 and would recommend someone looking to purchase a Hard Disk DVD Recorder to give some consideration to the unit.

I'm thrilled to bits with this great machine! It was bought as a replacement for our ageing Panasonic VCR, which had started chewing up tapes and becoming less than reliable. I was expecting problems setting up after reading reviews here. Don't people read these manuals before trying to set up equipment? Yes, it is a lengthy manual but this machine is complex & capable of a great deal more than a simple VCR. I am amazed, as other reviewers have said, that you can do different things at once, such as transfer from VHS tape to the hard drive whilst watching something else stored on the hard drive, for example. I have successfully transferred some VHS tapes to the hard drive already (2nd day) and the quality of the recording is excellent - something of a surprise! Why does the quality of the recording seem better after this process, can someone tell me? Freeview picture is great. Still have several functions to check out - must read that thing called a manual! The only negatives I can think of have been mentioned before. The remote is a bit cheap & lightweight and the display lights for the HDD & DVD are so ridiculously bright (blue and orange)they are initially distracting. But if that's all I've found to complain about, then I'm more than happy.

Got this unit a week or so ago from Amazon for £184 - I'm not sure why their prices fluctuate so much. It replaced a Philips HD520 which crashed all the time, and lost the HDD file system periodically and would not write to DVD+R's reliably. What a difference the Sony makes - at least so far. We can't get Freeview yet despite being in a large town centre, so for the time being I use a combination of analogue and hook in my Sky digibox (free-to-air version) to get the other channels beyond the basic 4. The Guideplus works brilliantly (similar to Freeview's EPG), and allows me to select analogue stations and those form the sky box (using a g.link stick on remote widget) - one touch recoding and labelling for all channels. I have a small issue in that some stations (Channel 4+1)don't appear in Guideplus but I'll experiment and figure it out in the end (it seems that Guideplus pulls EPG data via scart from the sky box, but some channels are number wrongly or missing). The GUI is simple to use especially post setup - the unit can do a lot of stuff so you have to be patient to figure out what you need and don't need. Picture & sound is excellent. Neat features for me include simultaneous record and playback of a previous recording (which they probably all do now, unlike my Philips), re-coding to fit recordings onto a DVD, and easy A-B editing to lose bits of a recording you don't want and more importantly the adverts (which, get this, are cleverly are marked on a time line for you, making removal really easy). This unit is supposedly a rebadged Pioneer, but either way I really like it, and it marks my permanent disinterest in anything made by Philips.

I bought this from Amazon 3 months ago and both the recorder and the remote are fantastic.
I connected it up quickly and easily and was soon recording to hard disk. It is very quiet, the quality of both the recordings and the freeview pictures are great (the signal strength I get on freeview is medium). The remote can control the basic functions on my tv (channel, volume, standby) by entering a code meaning I've vitually retired my TV remote.
Digging deeper required the manual and that's where this Sony is weak. I've had trouble setting up Guideplus so have reverted to the digital EPG, and automatically recording from my Virgin box is proving beyond me. When I need to record from the Virgin box I just set the virgin box to the right channel manually.
All in all I would heartily recommend this to anyone (who doesn't want to go the Sky route) looking for a mondern replacement for the VHS player. The Chase play and series record functions have proved a real boon and my only advice would be to get the 250Gb HD model (the Sony RDR-HXD995 250GB Hard Disc Drive DVD Recorder as the HD on this gets quite quickly used up if you record in SP (the default quality). But at least you can archive to DVD if you want to keep the recording.

All in all thank you Sony! All I need now is my new 40" LCD TV........