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

Brilliant machine there is so much you can do with it. Reception of all Freeview Channels immediately improved which I didn't expect. I can copy videos and DVD's. Make and edit DVD's, add Chapter Headings etc... and of course record so much onto the disk drive. Its great. The manual has so much in it I still havn't covered it all.

This Recorder works wellSony RDR-HXD890 Freeview+ 160GB Hard Disc Drive DVD Recorder - Black

We've got a 40" Sony Bravia TV so made sense for us to get a Sony DVD as well. Went for this one as the spec looked good and we wanted to be able to record onto a hard drive. The first one arrived and we had problems - picture kept freezing on playback from the hard drive and the picture would also pixellate out often when just watching straight TV. DVDs also used to freeze a lot but we put that down to probably a new machine with new technology means it is ultra sensitive to scratches and such like. Anyway, after a couple of weeks and having re-installed it a few times and checked and even replaced connections, we sent it back to Amazon who were great. No questions asked and replacement arrived straight away. To be honest, it's a good few months since we set up and installed the replacement and we find no difference whatsoever - playback on the hard drive still freezes and pixellates out and DVDs freeze and when you can't fast forward, the set just turns off. Recently we bought a £100-ish Samsung DVD player for a spare room and when a DVD froze on the Sony we took it upstairs to see once and for all if it was the player of the DVD. It played without any problem at all. End result is there must be a fault with the Sony so we're going to contact Amazon for advice and then I guess go to Sony to see if they can sort it out. Our advice? If it's hit or miss on whether a player is any good or not, it probably means to give it a miss.

We got the previous model a couple of years ago and I was looking for the same thing again to go in another room at home. The current model has better software and seeme sto work even better.
Highly recommended.

From reading other reviews the DVD recorder was expected to be difficult to set up.
Far from difficult the set up was much easier than other comparable products.
Two areas to be recommended before using set up:
1) Decide how unit is to be connected especially VCR etc. - the operating instructions do help
2) Decide whether program guide is going to be analog or digital. Then complete sections of operating instructions can be ignored.
Most of the defaults can be left and changed at a later time if necessary.
Recording to both HDD and DVD is straightforward and menu driven.
Although the TV monitor was not listed, trying each setting finally allowed the single remote to operate DVD recorder, digital tuner and TV monitor.
All in all everything was as expected.