Philips HDR 3700 Review

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4.5 stars
Average rating for this product is: 4.5 out of 5

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trendski's Review of Philips HDR 3700 Digital Video Recorder

23rd Jun 2009

Overall Rating

4.5 stars
  • Value for money
    5 stars
  • Features
    4.5 stars
  • Time DVR Owned
    Less than a Week
  • Ease of Use
    4.5 stars
Good Points

Quality kit. Amazingly quiet and fast. Recording options especially the options around time shift buffering are exceptional. Time shift buffering is outstanding.

Support via web and then freephone if required is excellent. Price value unmatched for the quality as of 06/09.

Very quick. Good remote that is extensive and well labelled.


Bad Points

Menu system user interface is not up to what say a company like Apple would have provided, but then who else does?


General Comments

Silent fan is a huge plus+ and is the most noticeable thing about the Philips HDR 3700 Digital Hard Drive DVD recorder apart from its excellent build quality appearance. Anyone who has ever bought an HDD recorder with a noisy fan will appreciate the machines silence!

Lots of useful connections, Scart(s), HDMI, optical etc etc

The blue HDD light can't be dimmed but as far as display lights go it does communicate top notch quality - as far as a simple light can do that.....

The manual is quite extensive although there is a good quick start guide and getting started is easy.

The Settings menus are quite complex although there is context sensitive help at the menu footers if you notice. Some adjustments can be made directly via the display menu without having to burrow deep into the Settings menus.

Timer recording is a breeze and the remote includes an alphanumeric keyboard mobile style for renaming titles. (SPP recording from regular broadcasts I find ideal. It comes between SP and LP)..

Something that has to be mentioned is the Time Shift Buffering. 6 Hours stored automatically even while you may be playing back a title already stored on HDD. I don't know yet if there is an SD card or some flash RAM inside. There may be. One of the things you can easily do is say watch a film and then use it to go back to its beginning, press the record button and it then writes (silently as usual) the contents of the buffer from that point until the end. The only limit is that the buffer is 6 hours. Of course alternatively you can use ordinary recording or via the timer when you are only limited to the disk space left, but the time shift option is extremely useful for retrospective decisions I reckon. I haven't seen a better implementation yet.

For extensive HDD title lists a page down facility for browsing, or access via title number would be useful but even so what there is is a lot better than other setups I have seen.

Support from the UK Philips web site is good and they even have Freephone support which is amazing in our era of 'rip-off the consumer aftercare'!

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Members' Comments ontrendski's Review

  • trendski Rank: Lance Corporal on 8th Jul 2009

    Comment about SD or RAM buffer was wrong. You can read from the disk i.e. view an HDD recording while a live recording onto HDD is being written (recorded). The disk seems high quality as mentioned.

    The EPG system could be improved. Using the guide to browse listings changes the channel and selecting a broadcast pulls up the timer recording menu which is ok if you want to record but should be optional I think.