Sony SVR-S500

I don't own the Sony SVR-S500 but have read that the EPG NO LONGER WORKS. Inview who had the contract to provide it has said it's contract has expired and not been renewed.

Quite frankly a PVR without an EPG is not a lot of use. You CAN work it by finding out when your program is on (TV Listings?) and then setting it all up yourself - but you're NOT being told that on sales I've seen (Amazon).

So, until SONY sort out the mess (IF it does) then this device CANNOT do what it is advertising - and if Sony don't provide a replacement service for those people who already own it then we should all be avoiding their stuff.

Go to Which online and search for this model number and you'll find other makes affected as well.

SONY SVR-S500

I am surprised so many people have problems with this unit as I have 2 and think it is fantastic.

I would say a lot of the problems reported are due to a week signal which once the "switchover" has been done and masts are not sharing power between analogue and digital then this should be improved.

Noisy? what you mean the fan? I suppose so but then I usually have the TV on at the same time so don't notice it.

2 down sides as far as I am concerned, 1, it is slow to generate previews, 2, it has no dvd recorder.

If everyone is so unhappy, stick it on Ebay and I will buy it.

Can anyone suggest an alternative ( with 2 digital tuners)?

Believe me.. I've tried VERY hard with this machine but after recording a programme I really wanted to see and then having the joy of watching 2 hours of interrupted, green digital interference, sound drop out and the like

I've personally had it with this Sony SVR-S500 Recorder!

My £12 freeview receiver from Wollies shows a better picture than this product in my opinion. Not recommended!

I paid £60 off ebay for my Sony SVR-S500 a year ago as a refurbished unit and never had one problem with it, infact i would say i got a bargain, epg works fine , and can record 2 channels at once no problem, can rewind (30 mins) and pause no problem, picture quality on my 40" lcd is great (much better than my panasonic dvd recorder with in built freeview picture) , recording anything is easy as 123, if you can get this cheap with a warranty i would say go for it !!

The Sony SVR-S500 is one that should never have got out the design house. It's slow, it's noisy and the general design of the software is very very poor. Regularly crashes overnight dusing EPG download, requiring a power cycle to recover. We have just had it format the disk twice in a week. Taken back to John Lewis (thankfully have a 2-year warranty) who have reformatted the disk (eh, thanks for that!) and upgraded the software.Awaiting next format any day now...

When I received this product as a gift I was disappointed because the person at the sales desk had told my relative that the machine was a DVD recorder with built in freeview and a hard drive. When I was told this I was chuffed because it did everything, or so I thought. When I took it out of the box there was obviously no DVD slot so when I took it back to Argos they said that it was exempt from the 16 day money back guarantee and did they offer to swap it considering they sold us the wrong thing? Did they heck!All of this aside I have had the machine for 18 months now and up until a couple of weeks ago the machine itself has been great. The other day the machine updated the EPG at 3am as usual and the rather loud fan switched on as it does every day, but then it came on at 4, 5, 6 & 7 am and stayed on for a couple of minutes each time, which becomes very annoying when you're trying to sleep. Also, every now and then the whole screen goes black and you can't see anything, you can only hear it. This too is very annoying when you are trying to watch TV.Upon taking it back to Argos they have said that it is out of the standard 1 year warranty, and having lost the receipt for our extended warranty we have had to take the machine to a different shop for an engineers report (I think thats what it is anyway) and if all the faults found are manufacturers faults then Argos have got to replace the machine because any electrical product with a manufacturers fault bought from Argos has to be replaced if it is under 6 years old.

Avoid the Sony SVR-S500- this is probably the poorest piece of electronic equipment I have ever purchased. Very unreliable, very slow to react to any command and very very very very very noisy!!

Noisy, especially at first. The EPG took a few days to appear. If you use the EPG to record a named programme, it cuts the programme off one minute from the end.

As soon as the warranty expired, it claimed to have forgotten everything on its hard disk and then stopped working altogether.

A big disappointment from Sony.

I bought the SVR-S500 from a eBay dealer for £80. It has worked brilliantly for the last 5 month, then all of a sudden it delayed changing channel for a few days before it finally packed in for good. I contacted the dealer I bought it off who told me to format the machine and if it still occurs basicallly to get in touch with Sony. Sony dont want to seem to direct me to the right place by giving me numbers for different places. Wish I'd read your guys reviews before buying, I thought sony meant quality. Would have been better off buying a Goodmans or Pacific (or something equally as supposed low quality).

I got the Sony SVR-S500 of my son he mislaid the power supply leads no problem i thought, tried maplins no avail not a standard part tried partsmasters they gave me a price for one part the figure of 8 lead but when i double checked it was for the complete set (including the ac/dc part ) no that came separately yes can get no problem - except the price £135 thanks but no thanks i could go and buy a new machine for that. Anyone knows differently i be interested thanks.