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39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Multiple problems, 23 Dec 2008
I've had several issues with this recorder. The spec is impressive and it does claim to do as much as more expensive machines, but as the saying goes, "you get what you pay for."
Positives: setting up is relatively easy and the manual is not bad, although in places it goes into Far Eastern English gibberish that I thought I'd seen the last of. It plays DVDs just fine and I used a hack code to make it multi-region very easily. The remote has a good layout, easy to use buttons, and the on screen displays are adequate.
Negatives: The Freeview guide is painfully slow to scroll through, both left/right, and up/down, as it seems to refresh the whole guide each time you press a button. Getting from channel 001 to channel 032 took me a couple of minutes. After inserting a DVD-RW and letting it format, to record a programme you simply highlight it in the guide, then press the RED(A) button and select Yes to reserve it. A symbol comes up in the highlight to show it's set to timer record. Now exit the guide and switch the machine into standby. A red symbol on the display shows it's set to timer record the programme you selected. I watched the machine spring to life at the start time, record, and turn off at the stop time, all seemed well. However, after turning the machine on to watch my recording, I let it do its flashing LOAD thing, but when I pressed the button to view the titles I'd recorded, a message came up to say there were no titles on the disc i.e. it hadn't recorded my programme. I tried repeating the process several times, sometimes it would record and sometimes it wouldn't. The final straw was when I turned the machine back on after trying to record something, and it just sat there with LOAD flashing on the display. I waited 15 minutes, no remote buttons worked except the Standby button. At that point I turned it off, unplugged all the cables and packaged it up for return, and a refund, mainly because I couldn't get my disc out. I've since purchased a slightly more expensive Panasonic, it's perfect.
Samsung products are usually pretty good but my experience with this recorder is that it sucks. The hardware build quality is very good, it looks sleek, and mechanically it's sound, but the software driving the features is not good. Unfortunately this is not the first time I've had issues with Samsung quality.
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