Ellion DTR-850D 160GB HDD DVD Recorder with DivX and Freeview

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Customer reviews

review by: date: 2007-06-07 rating:
Great Spec - Appalling Implementation
The user interface is one of the worst I have ever had the misfortune to use. 4 separate button presses and 40 sec wait to get to a Freeview channel from standby. The 7 day EPG takes 7 minutes to load - for each channel!!! Persistent random freezes and hangs. Totaly unusable. Returned to supplier within a week.

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review by: date: 2007-05-14 rating:
No technical support
As with other reviews this looks great on paper but doesn't live up to its billing, especially in the DTV area - continually freezing, loss of digital channels, etc. At first only occasionally, but recently it happens all the time. Per the warranty sheet I called Goodies Enterprise who told me they no longer support these machines if they are bought from Amazon, and that Amazon themselves will support them. I wonder if Amazon know this, as there appears to be no technical support pages or contacts on the web site. The callback facility just gets you through to a non-technical call centre in the USA. They arranged a replacement and hopefully this will work a little better, but the lack of support is worrying.

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review by: SurveySam.com date: 2007-03-16 rating:
Great Idea - Horrible execution
It sounds like a great idea - A freeview receiver, DivX player, DVD and HDD recorder in one with a USB port. Beware though, as this a poorly executed concept.

The Freeview reception is horrible, the picture is grainy and flickers, colours are changing all the time - this has nothing to do with the strength of the signal as my 4 year old Sagem box had perfect picture, and we live very close to the transmitter. The EPG takes forever to load. It will start loading everything again every time you enter it, and instead of showing you what's on now, it will load all the programme information - for the whole day. It is slow, clumsy and unintuitive.

The USB transfer takes ages - I tried transferring a 140mb file and that took about five minutes. Unacceptable.

The file browser, and the overall navigation are a nightmare - small windows and slow response. When you instert a disc, instead of showing you what's on it, it will show you the root folder of your hard drive. Smart.

When you turn the machine on, it goes to DVD by default. To get to Freeview, you have to press the TV button on the remote, which first takes you to analogue reception (?), and then you have to press the TV button again to get to digital. Why it does not go straight to digital, I have no clue.

It takes a while to turn on as well, 15-20 seconds, and the fan emits a constant low hissing noise.

To finish off, if you still decide to get this, just have a look at the "screensaver" that goes on after a short while. It's not even funny.

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review by: date: 2007-02-22 rating:
Not as bad as others said
I was hesitating to buy the unit due to bad reviews but I heard from my friend who bought the same unit that he was quite satisfied with it so far so I took a risk.

There are two different set-ups, general set-up on Analogue mode and Digital set-up on Digital Mode, which is same as other branded products as Analogue and Digital channels scanning should be done separately anyhow.

The digital channels captured are around 104 including radio channels which is not bad at all compared to other freeview devices however due to some reasons BBC3 & BBC4 are missing while all main digital channels come on.

EPG would come on in a reasonbale time around 10 seconds or so which is even faster than my NTL cable box and with 7 days schedule.

I have recorded several digital TV programs on timer and all stored ok onto HDD and copied some onto DVD +RW discs without problems.

So long as you would get the hang of this machine, I think this machine would be ok and also the value is quite reasonable for such HDD capacity, Freeview & DVD Recorder.


review by: Ben B-G date: 2007-02-03 rating:
Freeview disaster
Pros:
Joy to look at
Large HHD with good recording quality and playback
Excellent set of features
If you never want freeview this may be the unit for you

Cons:
Menu (etc.) screens are badly designed
Setup is very poor
Frustratingly slow to customise channel lists
Freeview reception is poorer than my four-year-old unit
The EGP isn't. It is an unusable function.
Incited desires it did not fulfil!

I purchased this player last week and was overjoyed when I first saw it - it's a very slim and attractive unit and promises a great deal. Unfortunately the reality is far less appealing.

The DVD and HDD playback are fine, tragically the freeview is awful. Not only is the picture quality relatively poor but it was unable to tune many of the channels (including BBC1 and BBC2!) that I have been watching perfectly on my four-year-old sony freeview box! The quality of the image seems poorer than the old unit when I plug both of them in at the same time.

Worse still, the EPG (electronic program guide) is a disaster. It takes seven days to download seven days' worth of information! The guide is for the selected channel only and not a "now and next" type thing. It shows information for the whole day for that channel, such that if you are watching channel four at ten o'clock at night, it will start to download the days' list starting from midnight the previous day from scratch every time! It takes about a minute and a half to get this information. If, for example, you then wanted to see what's on BBC1 you'd have to switch to that channel by flicking back through each channel in between (suffering a three second delay on each channel) to get to BBC1 and then wait whilst it loaded information for that channel from midnight that day, taking the best part of two minutes... It is totally unusable. Far better to go and buy a copy of the TV times to find out what's on next.

It's a crying shame that the software lets down what is a very promising unit, but don't let the excellent price and feature list fool you: this is a terrible unit if you ever want to use the freeview.

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Similar categories

Electronics & Photo . Categories . Sound & Vision . Digital TV Recorders & VHS
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