Browsing Sony DVD Recorders
Sony RDR-HXD870 - DVD Recorder With 160GB Hard Drive - With Freeview - Silver. Best Buy
Sony RDR-HXD870 - DVD Recorder With 160GB Hard Drive - With Freeview - Silver. Best Buys. Compare prices and features on this Sony RDR-HXD870 - DVD Recorder With 160GB Hard Drive - With Freeview - Silver.!
See our New 2006 range of cheap Sony RDR-HXD870 - DVD Recorder With 160GB Hard Drive - With Freeview - Silver.. Listed below is the cheapest price for the Sony RDR-HXD870 - DVD Recorder With 160GB Hard Drive - With Freeview - Silver. with Amazon UK.
Popularity - 350. The lower the number the more popular.
Price - £199.99 Correct as of 03/04/08
Average User Rating - 
View Reviews
To purchase this product from 
at the great price of
£199.99 click the 'buy now' button below or click
Buy Now from Amazon.
Back to Top
5 Reviews for Sony RDR-HXD870 - DVD Recorder With 160GB Hard Drive - With Freeview - Silver.
Good unit with one irritating flaw in the firmware. - 25 Mar 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful.
On the whole I am very pleased with this unit.
Good points:
Mostly does what it says on the tin. It has more features than I will ever use. The USB port on the front will even accept a keyboard for text entry when labelling titles and discs. This feature in NOT mentioned in the manual.
When not fast copying the HDD and DVD drives are quiet.
If you are copying stuff to keep, then you can record it to HDD, edit out the adverts and the start/finish announcements before burning it to DVD.
Bad points:
If you are using the remote control to enter text, the manual says that you can either select the letters on the screen or repeatedly press the number keys SMS style. It would be helpful to have the letters included in the legends on the remote control.
I have my sky + box connected upstream of the recorder to the Line 1 input so that if I want to copy stuff across it makes use of the RGB output from the Sky box. Unfortunately this means that you cant watch the Sky box whilst recording from the built in Freeview tuner. It would be good if the Line 1 input could be passed through even when recording Freeview. (I don't have an HDMI input on my telly). I have found a `plug around' around solution to this problem, but it involved me having to purchase a SCART distribution amplifier (£30) and use 2 SCART inputs on my telly.
If you want to record stuff using the AV inputs on the front then you can have any format as long as it is 4:3. A means of selecting 16:9 would be helpful.
The Manual is appalling. It is so bad that even Sony miss understood one section when talking to me an the phone - more of which later. I am fortunate to have relevant engineering experience and background to assist me with setting up and using the kit, but I don't know how the average non techie who just wants to `plug and use' would cope.
There appears to be a serous bug in the firmware. Fast dubbing between the HDD and DVD is fine. However, if the material on the HDD has been recorded at SP and you wish to copy more than 2 hours worth to a 4.7Gb DVD, then there is a problem with 16:9 material. 4:3 material copies across just fine but 16:9 material is copied across squashed into 4:3 format. To give Sony their due, they did respond to my message on their web site with a phone call to try and help. However the chap I spoke to told me that the it was due to `having to compress the material to make room on the disk'. I know for a fact that this is wrong particularly as I can work around the problem by loading the files from the DVD to my PC, modifying the WSS flags and then copying them back to DVD-r. I have tried further communication with Sony, but they seem reluctant to talk to me any more. I get the impression that they think I don't know what I am talking about. I am convinced that a modification to the firmware would sort the problem. You could argue that all I need to do is force my widescreen telly to display 16:9. However if you are replaying the discs on a 4:3 set then you don't have that option.
I find the menus a bit clunky to use however I can put up with that.
I see from the above that I have written more about the bad than the good. Will I be sending the unit back? No. Would I buy it again? If the Aspect ratio problem was sorted then defiantly yes. If not then I would certainly look elsewhere first.
Excellent machine, easy to use - 03 Mar 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful.
After buying and returning a similar spec Panasonic, I did a bit of research looking for players with the specs I wanted; digital tuner, upscaling, multi-region capability, fair size HDD, and found only four or five that met my requirements.
Reviews on Amazon and elsewhere led me to this one, and I'm not at all disappointed. Some reviews said it was not that intuitive to use, but I've found it to be a piece of cake, both following on screen instructions and reading the manual, which to be fair, is rather large (even though I normally let my wife learn new stuff first and then teach me).
Picture quality from DVDs and tuner is really good, pause live T.V function is a doddle and editing out ads and unwanted bits is really easy.
Price wise from Amazon it is £40 quid cheaper than my local Sony dealer, and buying a remote multi-region unlocker from Ebay made that part simple and cheaper again than my Sony dealer doing it for me. The codes to unlock it are available online and are cheaper still.
All in all an excellent buy from Amazon.
Good recorder let down by EPG - 27 Dec 2007
14 out of 14 found this review helpful.
This is a very good recorder let down by a fault in the EPG. Basically it's fine if you set it to record programs on the same day. However programs set more than 24 hours in advance can be lost.
The good news is that apparantly (according to the pcadvisor website) Sony have a fix on CD-ROM. Call them on 0800-1695263.
Not a Dual Digital Tuner !!! - 25 Dec 2007
11 out of 12 found this review helpful.
Don't be caught out by the "Integrated Dual Digital and Analogue Tuner". I thought this would mean it has two digital tuners and that I could record BBC1 and watch BBC3 but you can't you must watch the channel you are recording. Dual means one digital and one analogue. Also the EPG interface is not as nice as the VTX-D800U it has the same layout but it feels a bit crowded and is baby blue not the crisp grey and white. I'm still getting to know this device so may post again.
Quality build Quality performance - 10 Dec 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful.
Very satisfactory product with good features.
Pity about instruction manual. Need a lot of patience or a BSc to understand it easily. Dose not have an easy menu or basic functions to get you started.