Andrew Taylor

After much hassle, I’ve finally got my hands on my latest toy – a Humax Freeview Personal Video Recorder.

It’s a Twin Tuner Freeview box with a 160Gb hard drive for recording TV to MPEG and allowing you to watch it later (just like a video recorder but it’s all recorded to the internal hard drive). You can also pause live TV, watch picture-in-picture, copy the MPEG files to your PC and schedule recording using the 7-day EPG.

The quality is excellent and general operation of the device is sound. The worry of making sure you have a video tape free to record on is no more – you just leave it to get on with the job. The disadvantage is that you can’t now just take a tape to another video recorder to watch it, but coupled with a DVD recorder this could be a work-around. Or copy to a PC using the USB interface and burn to DVD.

A word of warning – after ordering this from 247electrical, I was promised delivery in 3 days. After 7 days the order status hadn’t changed from “Processing” so I emailed the company to find out what was going on.

I then found a number of reviews of the company (1, 2, 3) which I really wish I’d found before. Eventually I heard that they didn’t even have any in stock, so I cancelled the order and requested a refund. Given the worries I now had, happily the refund arrived about 4 days later.

So then I ordered it from CWDigital who confirmed they had it in stock and delivered 2 days later. Very impressed and well recommended.