Sony SVRHD700

Good – If it died it would have to be replaced the same day, it is essential equipment. We had pretty poor analog reception but pick up all channels fine on this. We have an SD box on another TV that is much poorer at picking up the signals in the same conditions. It has lasted much longer than the first digital PVR I owned. It has been in heavy usage for over 2 years and rarely misses a beat, we record everything we want to see and zap through the ads. The volume changes hugely between the SD and HD channels that can have us diving for that remote in a panic. it sometimes loses its connection to the TV and needs a reboot, awkward if it is recording at the same time. It seems very sensitive to the pulses sent out by the networks and it will break recordings up according to them and change the timer if it is a regular program

Terrible – purchased a sony svrhd700 ON 07-06-2006 , FROM DAVID JONES KOTARA , in newcastle for $1089.00 , took the recorder back to DAVID JONES for a full refund on the 17-11-2006 , nothing but trouble at least 3 visit,s to the repair shop , would only tape selective programs and leave other pre set program,s out. nothing but trouble from day one ..

Good – We purchased this product with a 250Gb hard drive for about $1050 in November 2006. So far we have used mainly manual recording ie we hit record when the program starts. It seems to work really well. A couple of times we have had a message 'playback failed', and been unable to watch a program we had tried to record. This happened on SBS. The machine sometimes seems to automatically protect a recording without our intervention. This just means it takes a few extra button pushes to delete a recording when we are finished with it. Apparently it is a firmware problem, and Sony will upgrade the firmware under warranty. We have ver 1.10, I think it's now up to ver 1.20. It is easy to record. 250Gb lets us record nearly 70 hours in SD. (We have nearly filled it a couple of times, so I would recommend getting the biggest hard drive you can.) The twin HD tuners let us record two programs at a time. At the same time we can playback a program we have recorded previously. (As our TV also has a tuner, we can also watch live TV while recording two programs - if you are using the PVR as a set top box, you can only record one program while watching live TV) The on-screen colour isn't as dynamic when watched through this PVR, as when watching normal TV. It seems quite muted, and as we bought a new LCD TV at the same time it seems a shame that the picture quality isn't fantastic.

Channel changes take a long time; in fact most buttons have a very long delay, which can be irritating.