Sony RDR

Our living room is getting out of hand. You walk in to a wall of hot air, with electronics stacked floor to ceiling and one small seat in the corner where you can perch, to enjoy the fruits of our dangerous wiring and potentially fatal heat output. As much as we like to discourage strangers from disrupting our audio-visual pleasure, a reduction in the number of boxes would be most welcome. Enter the Sony RDR-HXD995, a DVD player with DivX support and a 250GB Freeview PVR.

As you’d expect from a high-end PVR, you can pause and rewind live TV, start watching a programme on a delay while it’s still being recorded and, of course, setting a timer recording is as easy as pressing a button.

Like most Freeview PVRs with DVD recorders built-in, there’s no second tuner for recording one channel and watching a second. You do, however, get the extra flexibility of being able to record from external sources, which some would argue is a more useful feature, considering many TVs have Freeview built-in these days. If you’ve got Sky or Virgin, the ability to record from these sources via Scart is pretty handy. This being Sony, you can even plug in a camcorder via FireWire (it’s called iLink in the Sonyverse) and store the video on the hard drive or DVD.

The ability to handle DivX and XviD is a handy (although pretty much universal) addition to a DVD player these days. We’re still glad to see it on a Sony though, because there was a time when it wouldn’t consider allowing such functionality — the downside of owning TV and movie studios. You can also play and record to pretty much all of the DVD formats, including both writeable and re-writeable discs.

These days you need to be able to upscale to 1080p to be one of the cool kids, and we’re pleased to say Sony won’t be getting its head flushed down the toilet, because it can upscale with the best of them.

You can get the HXD995 right now, for a smidge under £300. Considering how much it can do, this strikes us as a fair price. We’ll be reviewing it soon, so keep an eye on the relevant reviews channel. -Ian Morris

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Sony RDR

If you don’t have Sky+ or a Freeview PVR, you might not know what an awesome advantage they offer. Everyone who’s ever bought one will tell you, it’ll change your life. Unless you already download all your TV from the Interwebs, in which case it will still seem frustratingly 1998.

The Sony RDR-HXD range is designed to offer as many features as it’s possible to squeeze into one small case. They can, obviously, play back your DVD collection, as well as upscaling it to 1080p — we should point out that this isn’t real 1080p, but it should make your DVDs look better nonetheless. They also feature Bravia Sync, which should enable simple, one-remote control via your TV, as long as you hook it up via HDMI, and have a CEC-compatible TV.

The whole range has DVB-T digital recording for Freeview, and there’s even the ability to record analogue broadcasts, for those of you who don’t live in a Freeview coverage area. You can also hook up a camcorder and transfer the footage directly to the PVR.

There isn’t much information on what types of discs you can burn to, but a look at the spec of last year’s models suggest that we shouldn’t expect RAM support or the ability to record on to dual-layer re-writable discs.

The RDR-HXD PVR/DVD combos all feature a hard drive of varying sizes. There are four models in total: the RDR-HXD790 has a 120GB drive; the RDR-HXD890 is endowed with 160GB; the RDR-HXD995 offers an impressive 250GB; and at the top of the range, the gargantuan RDR-HXD1095 can consume 500GB of your TV shows.

The 500GB model can record for as long as 1,420 hours, which is enough to record several episodes of The X Factor. What? They only last an hour or so? Seemed longer, much longer. Sony also includes a high-quality mode, which drops the total recording time on the HXD1095 down to around 73 hours. That’s still a huge amount of talentless singing in one place.

Expect these PVRs to become available around July, and although there’s no firm pricing yet, Sony has promised to send us review samples as soon as they become available. We’ll hold them to it too, because these machines look great. –Ian Morris

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Sony RDR

When we reviewed the Sony RDR-HX725 hard drive/DVD recorder earlier this month, we whinged about the absence of two key features. The RDR-HX725 didn’t have an integrated Freeview tuner or an HDMI output, which didn’t make us happy. We’re smiling now though — Sony has just announced the RDR-HXD860, which fixes both those problems.

Like its predecessor, the RDR-HXD860 has a 160GB hard drive for short-term recordings and a DVD burner for archiving the ones you want to keep. It supports almost all the common DVD formats including dual-layer DVD+R discs, which hold 8.5GB of data or 8 hours of recording.

You can use the electronic programme guide (EPG) to schedule recordings up to eight days in advance, or on a daily or weekly basis. If you’re recording to the hard drive, you can watch the beginning of a programme as you’re recording the end, or can watch a recorded programme while you’re recording a live broadcast (so you can watch last week’s episode of Lost while recording this week’s show, for example). The HDMI output offers 720p/1080i upscaling, enabling you to get the best out of your HD-ready LCD or plasma.

The RDR-HXD860 should be on sale in September for around £400. If you’re a little easier to please, there’s also the RDR-HXD560, with an 80GB hard drive and no HDMI. The simpler model will sell for around £350 and should be available by the end of the month. -ML

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