Home > Consumer Reviews > Humax PVR9300T 320GB Twin Tuner, PVR

I just got a Humax 9300 a few days ago (Feb 2009). Was a bit worried about the reports of fan noise, but thought I'd give it a go, and send it back if it was noisy, as they get otherwise very positive reviews. Had been mulling it over for weeks, looking at reviews, forums, etc.

Anyway, I've yet to notice any noise at all, even when recording two channels, or recording and playing back. If you put your ear really close, you can just hear a very faint whirring, but from more than a couple of feet away can't hear a thing. Certainly not when sat on the sofa. It's under my TV on a normal glass TV stand. I've done nothing special like stand it on a mouse mat, like people on some forums had done; there was no need.

Everything else about it seems good. The on-screen menus are a bit retro and blocky (especially compared with menus on my LG TV or Sony BluRay), but are easy to use.

The latest over-the-air software update which we picked up in January has put an end to the noisy fan problems referred to in previous reviews. It wasn't at all easy installing the software. The first you're aware of its arrival is an alarming error message. We found instructions on the Humax website which didn't seem totally helpful, and calls to the customer helpline were never answered despite endless queueing (at our expense). They also don't reply to emails.

We got there in the end through trial and error. It turns out you need to do a complete reinstallation both before and after accepting the new software. Our Humax 9300T now runs silently and works pretty well. The 5-10 minute wait for the programme guide to download every time you switch it on is a bit of a pain, but it's made up for by the many useful facilities to manage recordings, and of course, the hard drive's huge capacity.

On a couple of occasions recordings have been clipped by a few seconds at the top, and a recording once mysteriously stopped after two minutes. Overall, though, we can recommend this product quite highly.

Hughes Direct handled the delivery with awesome speed and efficiency.

I have returened this PVR today to Comet after only two days. I will tell you why. This is a brilliant product if you a can't get a decent Satellite pic- but have a 60% quality Freeview reception - 100% strength reception is NOT Enough- Where I live in Scotland, unfortunately has a bad reception, about 50% of the channels were really very good- (this product upscaled the standard definition channels to near HD fantastic quality) and the rest, because of the signal quality were very bad- I wish some one told me this before I bought this product- BUT COMET Aberdeeen were brilliant- very good shop and they understood the problem- OTHERWISE IT IS REALLY 5 STARS

Having read many good reports on this product I was dissappointed to experience frequent 'crashing/freezing' only recoverable by mains power cycling on each occasion. Performance while working was good and simple to operate. These experiences were repeated over 2 seperate items.

I bought a Humax PVR300T 2 weeks ago and it has crashed 6 times. This is a known issue and a fix has been issued but the box does not have an usb connection so I can't download and install the update via my pc. The over the air update for this model of Humax is not scheduled for this week or next even though the fix was released on the 12th of November. Would not recommend buying one of these boxes