Nikkai A52HF Review

Overall Rating

Cheap (If you have a spare hard drive)
Best digital reception I have seen on any freeview box.
Very quiet compared to some freeview recorders.
You can delete unwanted channels. (many other units can't)

Terrible EPG almost useless in fact.
Can only record 1 channel at a time.
No digital text. (MHEG5 red button etc)
Poor OSD. Very amateur looking.

I have owned this unit for a few months now, purchased from Maplin for £39.99. I had a spare 250GB hard drive laying around which I installed in the unit. This gave me a 250GB freeview recorder for under £40.

Initial set up of the unit was simple with no real problems. In fact other than using the manual for the hard drive install I managed to set up the unit and do some recording without reading anything. This is probably just as well as the manual is fairly poor.

Initial impressions of the unit were poor but I decided to stick with it and see if the unit was going to be usable. The unit was purchased as a replacement for a dvd recorder which had decided to start rejecting most DVD's recorded on it.

I partcularly liked the fact that you could delete unwanted channels, You will be surprised how many other manufactures don't allow this. particularly if you have a top-up tv recorder.

The first thing noticable was the quality of the TV reception on the unit. Most freeview STB's or recorders all seem to me to have a fairly similar picture quality and this unit is about the same. However many of the other units I have tried such as Digihome or TVonics were very prone to picture stutter or break up, however I have not had any problems like this with this unit.

The record quality seems to be identical to live and on my units seems to fast forward and rewind with no problem even when recording another program at the same time.

By far the worst aspect of the unit is the electronic program guide EPG and the now/next info. They quite simply doesn't work. Quis can make it a problem to set timed recordings using the EPG but it does sometimes work OK and they can be set manually anyway.

As other people have said "You can only record 1 channel at a time" True.. However if you can find 2 things worth recording at the same time then you are doing better than me. When the timer has been set I have never had any problem with the unit missing any recordings.

To sum up. Yes it's not great, but it can be cheap, picture and record quality is very good, The software is buggy but I have tried several recorders and they all seem to have something wrong with them.

If you have an existing hard drive (like me) want to do occasional recording (like me), couldn't care less about digital text (like me) then go and buy one you probably won't be TOO dissapointed.