Sagemcom DTR94320S 320 GB Freesat HD Digital TV Recorder

Looked around for a 320gb recorder which was HD and offered recording under £200, so I bought this, the reviews on SAGEM seem strong as I was going to buy the 250gb version, but went for this instead.
In the box was a leaflet on how to set up.
It comes with an HDMI lead and simple power pack with a rocker switch to turn of main power too.
I like fact this is very slim and lightweight.
I replaced an old sky+ box with this and it worked as it should do, asking me for my postcode and then it did an auto search.
We are now able to watch HD channels and record them, the picture itself is much, much better than previous, but that was standard def.
The button presses are quick and the menu is fool proof.
Very good value for under £200 and would recommend!!
Buy one!!

Having moved to a part of the country that does not receive very good freeview reception I was left wondering what I would do to get myself up and running with TV. I had two options. I could join Sky and pay over the top to get their TV package which at the time of choosing was offering their free internet to me at an additional cost of £17.99. Understandably I decided that this was not the most economical of choices to instead decided to purchase a Freesat box.

I already had a Sky dish installed from the previous owners of the house so I managed to save myself money by not needing to get a dish and installation. If you do not have a dish already then you will need to buy one which bumps up the cost.

Getting the box up and running was simple enough although at times with was quite temperamental. When installed I had almost a hundred channels to choose from. 90 of these channels were utter rubbish. This could be a personal opinion and of course many other people may find the channels amazing.

The box allows you to connect two cables from the dish to the box, meaning that you can watch one channel and record another. It is also able to record two channels at once. It has many of the features of a Sky Plus box meaning that you can pause and rewind live TV. If you do this then when you go into the channel guide to change to another channel then you often can not do this. You then have you change the channel out of the guide by going up or down a channel. Again this can turn out to be irritating. However when you record a programme that is part of a series it gives you the option to record the whole series at one click.

The box has a reasonable 320g hard drive which allows up to 160 hours of HD recording. It also upscales standard channels to an HD standard. Additionally it has an ethernet port so that you can connect to the internet and watch BBC iPlayer.

The look of the box was very cheap and nasty. The interface was also substandard. When using the menu guide the box often went into slow motion, meaning that to scroll through four or five channels could take up to a minute to do. In some cases the box would freeze completely and the only way to get up and running again was to turn it on and off at the wall. At there times the menu scrolled instantly with no lag at all. This could and did get annoying after having to get up and switch the machine off and on several times in a couple of hours.

When the box was switched on, regardless of whether it was recording or not, the box was very noisy as if the machine was spinning about. This again could get annoying and at times the TV had to be turned up to try and mask it.

Overall: The box did allow me to get TV channels but for the price I paid there were too many faults or irritations. The box looked and felt much cheaper than what I paid for it. It was the cheapest box I saw and this was reflected in the overall design. Having paid and extra £20 and got a HUMAX FoxSat box which has a 320gb hard drive I can already see how much better and more robust this box is. If you are going to buy a box I would highly recommend that you buy the HUMAX box over the SAGEM one. I would recommend that you never buy this one unless you have to

Very good value box with all normal Freesat offerings. Appears pretty robust operationally to date. Only annoying thing is that the Programme Guide and Channel list only show ALL the channels and cannot just show only your Favourite list. In fact, Favourites are rather a waste of time since they only operate when using the channel up/down button. Notwithstanding this, the box is very good value for a basic Freesat PVR and significantly cheaper than rivals.