We bought this Thomson DTI2300 Freeview digibox almost a year ago when it was on special offer at Curry's. Until recently we paid the extra for Top-up TV which I recently cancelled due to their changes. Now we are just left with the Freeview channels of which there are plenty for the time being. Apart from it crashing a few times (had to switch off, then on again to fix), we have had no problems with it.

We will be changing over to Sky in the near future, but plan to still keep this for my son's room upstairs.
Not a bad buy for the money, we found.

I won't give you the long story of the two Ferguson FDT 2000 STB's which Thomson broke with an over the air software update (Dec 16 2004 and May 2005). I took them back to Dixons recently and got two Thomson DTI 2300 STB's.

What's wrong with it?!?
Not only does it not control your video recorder with the STB timer through a fully wired Scart cable (it's supposed to, it has a number of "actions" for timer events; zap to channel, VCR ON, VCR On/Off ...) but only the first two timer events actually "event" when the "Action" is set to VCR On/Off, the box comes on, but it fails to start the VCR, on the third and subsequent events the box doesn't even come on !! I phoned the Thomson helpline printed in the manual, which gave a recorded message to phone another number, which then gave me another number . Of course they told me there was no general problems of this sort reported. I'm not sure I believed them, although they did agree with the description of the user interface as the worst there has ever been.

No Honestly!
The Thomson DTI 2300 gives a great picture but it's a pain in the proverbial if you want to record from it, or browse channels! No kidding.
To record you'll have to set the timer to "zap to channel", but don't switch the unit off because it won't switch from standby to do any zapping, and you'll also have to set the timer in your VCR as well.
If you want to know which channel you've browsed to, tough, because most of the time it doesn't show any banner giving you that info. Sometimes it does, and gives you the channel name, but gets rid of superfluous information like the date or time of day. I mean, who wants to know the time of day when you're browsing channels before your favourite program comes on?
You would have recorded your favourite program so you could FF through the adverts, but you haven't figured out why the VCR on/off action doesn't work yet. It did with the old STB. Then even when you have figured out a work around, actually setting the timers is nightmarish. Why doesn't pressing at least one of the increment/decrement buttons increment/decrement the time or date?

User Interface? Don't Make Me Laugh
This is the worst designed timer-entry user interface I have ever seen. In fact the whole user interface gives the impression of being designed by a blind man shouting instructions to a deaf dwarf who's first language is Norwegian. And the dinky little remote control shouldn't be called that. Dinky sounds cute, this is not. It's the Sinclair ZX Spectrum keyboard compared to even the cheapest qwerty keyboard you can find, and that's an insult to all coffee soaked electrocuting ZX Stickies surviving! Why don't Thomson just send round that Norwegian dwarf to smash your thumb and tendons with a hammer rather than supplying that crippling little grey git? A blind person would pick it up and think it was the instruction manual for the blind - the keys are so small.

The Thomson Design Team is to ergonomics as Jim Davidson is to comedy, it's not big, and it's definitely not clever.

Both boxes I got at the same time, they both don't work in all the important ways, but differ in other less important but still niggling ways.
Thomson Quality Control is to consistency as a small fluffy bunny is to the further understanding of the macro-economic impact of the failure to ratify the EU Constitution.

Thomson tag line? WE WON'T EVEN GIVE YOU THE TIME OF DAY.

One of the boxes was for my Mum.

I wonder if the blind guy was from another planet?

Due to problems with Echostar unit, I have moved onto the Thomson DTI2300. Whilst it is an improvement, it is not perfect by any means.

The menu's are slow and not intuative.

For some reason, despite the Echostar and a Sony set top box working fine, this unit does not want to pick up any ITV, or Channel 4, channels.

I have previously used the ariel output to provide the input to a TV & video in another room. However this unit stops this aditional video from displaying any picture (either through the video, or of a tape being played in the video).

So, it looks like I might have to give up on Top Up TV.