Sony RDR-HXD860

I never realised how useful PDC was until I got this recorder. Nearly all programmes run late against the schedule and I am fed up with getting the last minute or two cut off. It's a feature I just assumed would come standard. Even my old VCR had Video+ and PDC. Totally agree with Freeky. Very disappointed Sony.

Having never had an HD recorder before I plumped for this one following some good salesmanship in the shop. Now I am no Hi_Fi geek, am not looking for pixel perfect pictures and sound. This is for general family use.

So does it do this well - yes.

I have a sky box linked into line 3 though, as the previous reviewer points out, cannot use RGB. However the picture is fine. Further I have a Sony TV with terrestrial tuner into line 1. The picture quality is fine and a huge improvement on the old CRT we had. I cannot detect any of the poor picture quality that the previous reviewer noted, however I am perhaps easily satisfied. I can spot some fringing if close up but from the sofa everything is fine.

DVD upscaling is excellant and I notice none of the problems the previous reviewer notes. For family use it is fine.

The EPG is what really makes this tool easy and what attracted me to it. Simple, intuiative and does what it says on the box. Infact the whole menu system is easy and you can see that there are a multitude of settings to be tweaked.

I do agree that start up time is slow and the fan noise needs dealing with.

Overall, as a family tool this is perfect. But perhaps if you are more hi-fi fussy then things like the lack of optical output would steer you in other directions.

I bought the RDR-HXD860 after reading various reviews and Sony`s reputation, unfortunately I have been sourly disappointed. This range of machines seems to have been rushed to market with little attention to design or operation and even less to quality.

This model comes with a 160Gb hard drive and a DVD drive that reads all formats & writes to all except DVD-RAM. The remote is a good size and is well laid out and can also control a few TV`s but many major manufacturers are excluded. The unit has Composite, S-Video, DV, RGB & aerial inputs, outputs are HDMI, Component, Composite, S-Video, RGB and digital audio on coaxial (no optical out). There are 2 scarts, RGB out is on scart 1, but if you want to use smartlink for recording you have to use this scart for input set to composite! And if you do use the RGB out then the Component out is un-available. The first of many design issues.

The unit is quite slow to switch on & this gets slower the more programmes you have on the hard drive, even worse if you've got a disc in the drive as well! The unit has a variable speed cooling fan that is noisy even at low speeds, if you like a hot room best keep your volumes up high! Operation is quite straight forward but could be better and is quite slow, if you have more than 9 programmes recorded you have to scroll the list, but its very slow so if you need to get from the top to the bottom of say 30 recording it will take an age, and there are no shortcuts! Recording are numbered but you can't use number entry. When a programme your playing back has finished the unit goes into pause mode indefinitely??, so watch out if you have a plasma (screen burn).

There are 9 recording modes, from 1 hour per DVD to 8, however there is no mode to make a program exactly fit a disc for best quality. Recoding can be dubbed between the hard drive & the DVD drive but in many cases this has to be done with a re-record (not a straight digital copy) with the associated re-encoding so loss in quality. Also when dubbing to + media it is unable to use wide screen flags, so an anamorphic 16/9 recording becomes a cropped letterbox one! For best quality use the RGB input (or DV with your camcorder), however the onboard free-view receiver appears to be linked internally by composite! So recording are degraded with muddy colours & a noticeable chroma / luma phase shift, most noticeable watching snooker as each balls colour only roughly matches. If you record from your external box using RGB no problem, unless you have a sky digibox, as here this unit refuses to accept sky`s wide screen flags! You can use this unit to 'pause live TV' but you must be patient as oddly it must record at least 2 minutes before you can release that pause!, and you can never catch right up to live as the 2 min delay remains.

Editing a recording is OK but could have a lot better, it can be quite awkward to get to a precise edit point, the unit appears initially to be frame accurate, but can't cope with a series of close edits, and once the edited recording is dubbed the accuracy is lost. The audio is always faded out & then up at any edits. Also on 2 occasions the unit has failed when attempting an edit, destroying the recording in the process.

Recording from the EPG is perhaps this unit's forte, making timed recording very easy, so more the pity picture quality is degraded by bad circuit design. You can set the unit to extend recordings automatically in case they overrun, but there is no provision to start early!, so I've missed the start of a number of programmes. I also find at times that pressing the info button that is supposed to tell you what is currently showing only tells you what was on when the machine was switched on, this bug typically remains for days at a time before correcting itself.

For best quality output use the HDMI, but I find the upscaling doesn't work to well with original DVD`s giving the appearance of missing lines at times, I found it best to use the composite out for these, but here there can be issues with wide screen switching again! So for best use you must keep going into the system menu to change the outputs you can use.

If I had my choice again I would avoid buying this, a very poor effort from Sony.