Roberts Dreamtime

Poor design – It pains me to give this a poor review because I'm a fan of Roberts. The light display is ridiculous - blue light is a non-no for sleeping spaces, as any sleep expert will tell you. Also it's simply too bright even on its lowest setting, which means I have to turn the display off at night, thereby defeating the purpose of a clock radio! Also, the alarm can't be set without turning on the radio - which frankly is grounds for divorce!! Also the cover plate for the display fell off about 6 months after purchase, so disappointing all round.

Only one complaint – I'm very happy with the unit with the exception of the backlight. Like previous reviews, it is far too bright. I have turned it down but it is still very bright. I drape something over it to block out the light. In every other respect, the unit is good. I had trouble understanding the optional alarms but after re-reading the instructions, I now understand the workings.

Very disappointing – Backlight is ridiculously bright and even dimming it back to the least brightest setting was as though you had a candle burning in the room. Backlight can be turned completely off but you can't see the clock. I was lucky, as when I dimmed it off to the lighter settings, it caused a high pitched hum to come over the radio and on returning it to the retailer with what they agreed was an obvious fault, I opted out for another brand. Appeared to be well made. Backlighting issue.

Nice, but could be better – Best thing about this radio: I unpacked it, plugged it in , then started reading the manual to find out how to (1) tune it to some stations and (2)set the clock. Before I had found the right page, it had done both those things all by itself! I love the way it resets the time & tuning whenever the power has been off. The down side - I have two issues:

1. The sound quality is very clean and clear but the tiny speaker has no low frequencies at all. I tried to run an external speaker from the headphone jack but it doesn't work for some reason. I eventually resorted to opening it up and connecting a speaker lead directly to the internal speaker terminals. Now it's connected to a small hifi speaker as well as the internal speaker and sounds wonderful.

2. The screen puts out a very bright blue light that keeps me awake. The brightness is adjustable but even on minimum it's much too bright. And if I turn it away from the bed, I can't tell the time... I haven't solved that problem yet, but maybe just a piece of something semi-transparent taped over it might help.

Overall, I really like this gadget. I love the two alarms that know whether it's a weekday (early start) or weekend (much later). The station presets let me find my favourites quickly, and the reception is solid (I have a portable iRiver DAB+ that gets no signal in most of my house). The quality of the tuner is excellent - it's a pity they connect it to such a tiny speaker. good value, works well too bright light; tiny speaker only reproduces hi frequencies