Philips HDT8520 500GB Freeview HD Recorder Twin Tuner

[f1only]

Just had an email from here selling the above, it is refurbished at £139.99.

Has anyone had any experiences with this model & if so is it any good?

 

[professorhat]

Yup, and it's not good (see my post on it here). Current firmware has a new issue which means HD recordings stutter during playback. Quite a few owners still get bugs that were marked by Pace / Philips as fixed like duplicate recordings, issues with chase play, recording SD instead of HD versions of programmes. There was a spate of owners returning their boxes on another forum recently as they were fed up with the issues. My advice would be to avoid and spend £45 more to get the Digital Stream from John Lewis or the 320 GB Digital Stream for just £30 more from Amazon (my post on this is here).

 

[f1only]

Ok thanks for that Professorhat, i was going to use it for a bedroom, but i'm going to avoid it now.

Think i'll just wait until Panasonic bring out a cheaper version ( he says hopefully ) of their BD recorder player twin freeview HD HDD in that case then.

So will just move my old Pany DMR-EX78 into the bedroom, especially as the V HD box has iplayer on it, catch up is easy.

 

[professorhat]

Well, the 2011 models of the Panasonics are out soon, which may mean the older models see a price drop to try and shift them - worth looking out for any deals.