Dion digital 250gb freeview recorder

Sure this is cheap, but the faults with it mean it's in effect useless. Save up for something better.

For those of you with a morbid interest in such things, I'll list a few of the faults I've found:

1. The killer fault: it misses scheduled recordings. What's the point of buying a recorder if you can't rely on it to record something? Worse, if it misses a episode of a series, then it misses subsequent ones as well, as it's still waiting to record the episode it missed, which is in the past!

2. Poor image stability: the picture is prone to pixellating and stuttering. This is not an issues with signal strength as other freeview equipment I've used is fine with the same signal.

3. Prone to locking up when in standby: you have to then switch it off at the mains to get it working again.

4. Generally poor interface: the programme guide, planner and menus are generally clunky and difficult to use. Given that the other faults I've listed are all probably down to software issues, I get the impression the software for this has been written as somone's shool project!

I've persevered with this for several weeks now, hoping there might be a software update to fix some things (but these don't seems to happen), so I'm going to have to take mine back.

I am always a bit wary of buying makes I have never heard of, particularly supermarket's own brands, however this was £30 cheaper than an entry model known brand so I thought I would take the plunge.

The tuning process was easy, and once familiarised with the buttons and their functions its easy to change channels, set recordings, and negotiate the menus.

Recording a programme is as simple as selecting the required programme from the tv planner, and clicking the red button. The recorded programmes menu show what has been recorded, what is pending, and the percentage of the hard drive which has been used. Being able to record TWO programmes at once, whilst watching another channel is a useful feature too.

The hard drive space should be more than sufficient. I say should be because with 250gb of space it should record 120 hours of TV. However, with 25 hours of recorded TV and stuff programmed to be recorded we only had 60% of space left, so for some reason we only appear to have around 60 hours of space, system settings taken into account. In all fairness it will probably never be an issue for us, however we still feel somewhat cheated.

Viewing quality is good, with a slight interruption of signal here and there, and sound quality is sufficient if slightly low in volume even at the highest setting. Messages appearing on the screen now and then such as "LCD Updated" can become distracting, and having read the manual we have no idea what some of them actually mean!

So far so good, but here is where the machine lets itself down - it has a mind of its own!! Once tuned our freeview recorder found a whopping 78 channels, and we painstakingly went through each one deleting the ones we had no use for reducing it to a more moderate 40 or so channels. Unfortunately, when switching the machine to standby it decides to be helpful by searching for channels it may not have found previously, not detecting you have deleted them! So next day - back to 78 channels! Basically, you are stuck with them so the delete channel function becomes obsolete. Not such a problem as you just use the favourites instead, however I imagine for a family having the adult channels constantly reappearing could become an issue. Yes, there is a childlock feature, but that's not the point.

After a few recordings we noted some bizarre activity and this is where things seriously start to go wrong. When recording a programme for example, it would also continually record the same programme on "Plus One" when we had specifically not requested it to. It would also record other episodes from the same series when not prompted, generally behaving rather eratically. Sure, you can delete the unwanted recordings but its a chore that becomes increasingly annoying. Also, some programmes have randomly chosen not to record at all, for reasons we cannot determine, and other times trying to set a pre-recording prompted error messages. Other times recordings would begin several minutes into the programme itself.

So all in all, a machine of basic quality that you would expect for the money, with all the features and probably more that you might expect, but it lets itself down with some of the random activity which renders it unreliable. After owning for one month we bought a superior model.

Had this for 3 months, not worth the initial saving as having to buy a new one already!!

1.Constant freezing having to turn off at the mains!
2.Very poor remote having to be very precise where to point it (this finally gave up rendering the box useless)
3.Slow jumpy image
4.Recoring either wrong thing or for 4 hours on a 30 min programme.
5.Need a good signal as wont get channels other receivers do
6.Wont show alot of tv programmes after 2 days previous.