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

Problems with screen freezing. Research before hand suggested the product was pretty good. Unfortunately turned out to be unusable. Subsequent searches on freezing screen revealed a wide spread problem. Humax did't have a fix available immediately - but associated the problem with the UK switch over to digital. Double check your area with Humax before purchasing. I got a promise of my money back and a promise that the problem will eventually be fixed. So that is a good outcome - of sorts. Maybe I will try again when the problem is fixed as I can see other people are pretty impressed when it works.

We have had our Humax PVR for only a few days and so far it seems to be working well with no noticeable fan noise (presumably now cured by the appropriate downloads) but my experience so far of Humax (so-called) Technical Support has not been encouraging. After purchase I received an e-mail from Humax telling me that the latest re-tuning download would be on 2nd December. I then received another apologising for an error in the first e-mail and that the download would be on 3rd December. I contacted Humax Technical Support on 1st December to confirm what I had to do to make sure I received this download only to be told that it had taken place during the previous night and that I had missed it. It was supposed to be repeated again last night but my PVR does not indicate receipt of any download so goodness knows what is happening. When I enquired about another issue the "adviser" seemed to know little about it and care less. I could hear him cursing in the background and finally he simply rang off. Since the call had only lasted five minutes this seemed a rather cavalier attitude. I have sent an e-mail to Humax Customer Services raising my dissatisfaction with this incident but so far have received no acknowledgement or reply.
In short I can't say I have had any problems with the unit itself (so far) but if I do I have no great confidence in Humax being very helpful.

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 this HDD to replace a BT Vision box. It has a couple of nice features compared to the BT Vision box: upscaling up to 720p and a signal amplifier in the box.

However, there are a fair few downsides. First, is the TV guide this takes a long time to load from switching the box on from standby. I'd guess 10-15 minutes. It also only shows one week in advance: not great if you are going away. A second problem is that it fails to record when reception is not good. It doesn't record a garbled programme; it just doesn't record or records five seconds.

A third problem is recording series: you can only record series if you use the autotracking feature. The autotracking feature detects when a programme starts so if the start is delayed by say a sports event finishing late then it will start the recording later. A great feature except that it doesn't work. If there is a sports programme finishing late, you will find the recorder has redorded that and not your programme. If you have been using timer based recording in the last couple of years, you will know that programmes also never start at the time the channels say they will any more. With autotracking on you will miss 2-3 minutes from the start or end of every recording. So you need to ask the recorder to record a few minutes before and after each programme and then you can't record series. The fourth big problem with this machine is that despite having an HDMI connection and 720p uscaling it will not be able to record HD broadcasts. I find it hard to believe that this could not be fixed by a software update.

Then you have the fiasco of the early November digital switchover. The box constantly crashes, once every two or three programmes you record it will freeze up failing to record that programme and any subsequent programmes. The TV guide only loads two or three days. Humax told me in an e-mail that an update would be released to fix these problems, that was three weeks ago and still no update.

Overall, it is just an OK product. I imagine you can find a better HDD recorder. The BT Vision box, made by Philips, certainly was better. However, that box tied you into a 12 month contract of expensive broadband and an extra £13 a month for the Vision. The box will not work without a BT broadband connection so is now useless. My three stars is based on my faith that Humax will repair the problems caused by the digital switchover with an update. Otherwise, I would say that if they don't fix the problem, all the one star reviews you see are justified.

Generally very happy with this product, bought for my mum. I found it pretty much consistent with the other reviews, I'll just mention the things that I didn't know when I bought it:
Automatic tuning picked up BBC Wales rather than BBC England. This seems to be a common problem in the North West, seems like the device doesn't discriminate between strong and weak signals. Ended up having to enter manual frequencies, one at a time. It would be useful if these were stored for subsequent retunes.
User manual on CDROM - no paper copy. This was really irritating, my mum is in her seventies and has never been near a computer. It's just about acceptable with a computer peripheral, but now with a device like this.