Sony RDR-HX900

Took my Sony RDR HX900 unit to Sony Service Centre with list of faults at the end of the warranty period. All the faults are still there but Sony refuses to authorise any repairs as they say the warranty has expired. Having paid almost £600 for what I thought was the best product on the market, I am left with a unit that will only do what a £250 unit will do. Lesson, don't buy Sony. The cheaper stuff they produce has never been very good but their top end products are normally very good, pity their after sales is so bad. This unit has never worked properly from day one.

I don't know why my Sony RDR HX900 DVD recorder doesn't let me record on to a DVD from a video?? I have finalized the disc, and I am a bit sad because we paid 1400 Australian dollars for it, and I can't play a DVD on our 2 other DVD players that has been recorded on the Sony!

The Sony RDR HX900 DVD Recorder is a great machine, and would probably be the hands down choice of any serious stand alone recorder purchaser, if it had edit functions that are basic on competitor's models. Not being able to split titles on the HDD makes it difficult to maintain high quality recordings when transferred to DVD. The only way I have found to overcome the split issue, is to record the first hour of a movie or show, and then record the 2nd, 3rd hour etc... as a separate timer recording. This takes a little extra time, and you lose a little time between recordings, but allows HQ recording on more than one disk. The HQ+ mode produces impressive picture, but can only be dubbed to disk on HQ. If Sony were able to come up with a firmware editing fix for current users, and if they reintroduced the product with the fix, I'm sure this would be the leading recorder in the industry, regardless of price.

The biggest tragedy about the Sony RDR HX900 machine is that you can't divide programs that are recorded on the hard drive into smaller segments to dub onto the dvd-r. Let's say you recorded 8 hours of TV and now you want to split that into 8 one hour programs and dub them into separate dvds, good luck. The built in TV guide timer recording is very weak also. this unit does less things than other ones at half the price. Don't make the mistake I made. Avoid the Sony get the Panasonic.

The Sony RDR HX900 is a nice consumer grade product that does allow good ease of use for the occasional home video user. It has a few bonus features and can fit with other equipment to allow DVD production for the home video enthusiast.

We own numerous video units and in fact one of our users actually is a principal owner of a video production company and animation house in Orlando with years of experience with customers from Disney, Universal, Paramount, GE, OtoAssociates, and other companies with significant AV interests. Although the reviewer is not a professional at AV production, we do have extensive experience with home production, (consumer grade products) and with Professional production (commercial grade products).

I have had the Sony RDR HX900 DVD recorder for 2 months now and use it all the time. It interrogates Teletext to write in the program name and you can add a thumbnail too. I have archived all of my videos and easily put them onto DVD. You can do chase playback with the hard drive and with DVD-RW. It is multiformat and the picture quality in Long Play is superb. It writes to DVD at exceptional speed too. The response to the remote control can be tardy and the editing facility is cumbersome-a jog wheel would have been perfect. It takes 15 secs or so to fire up which is a minor point (although a little annoying). The menus are simply the titles of the programme and as such are a little dull. Notwithstanding this, like most Sony stuff, it is stylish, powerful, versatile and easy to use. I thoroughly recommend it despite the slight niggles mentioned above.

I bought a Sony RDR HX900 2 days ago, I ordered on line £500, well worth the money. The remote is one touch. Everything about this DVD recorder is excellent. It has a massive hard drive and easy one touch to change from hdd to disc. If you're thinking of buying a DVD recorder this is the one for you. Compatible with sky TV and motor satellite decoders