Philips HDR 3700

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'!