 Modern life is so
busy, scurrying around from place to place and when do you find time
to watch tv? So in the early 80's the VHS recorder or video appeared
millions were sold and shelves began to fill up with plastic boxes
with sticky labels on marked mum's tape.
And there we stuck, the world moved on and yet we continued with
VHS, yes a few things came and went but nothing mass market. Finally
however the mass market has some solutions the 1st recordable DVD is
clouded in a format war with HD DVD and Blue ray. The second has had
the doors blown wide open with the success of the SKY+ box.
The PVR or personal video recorder does away with tapes and
removable disks, instead it builds on the growth curve of cheap hard
drives and offers a massive repository for your TV programmes that
sits neatly where the VHS player used to.
While we have seen the success of Humax and Topfield in the DTT
(Freeview area) there has been nothing that pushes the Freeview
brand and also pushes Top Up TV. The Thomson Top Up TV plus recorder
however starts to bridge that gap and it arrive with us just in time
for the start on some footie on Freeview!
The Thomson Top Up TV Plus is a 160gb dual tuner device which
measures 366 x 221 x 55mm it is a Freeview DTT decoder and due to
its twin tuners it can record and decode a second channel for your
viewing.
Set-up was fairly painless and did not need the instruction booklet,
we connected the Thomson to the RF signal and then in turn via scart
to the TV set, there is also an RF loop through. The Top Up Tv Plus
is an SD (standard definition only) device but this is not an issue
as there is no current HD service available by DTT in the UK. Once
connected we used the remote to start the auto set-up where by the
unit hunts through the available multiplexes for the 50+ channels
and radio service available.
Once the search is complete a full channel list is presented and you
can start to browse channels. The EPG takes some time to download as
there is 14 days worth of data across all channels and it is
essential for this to download over the air before we can start to
test the PVR functions.
Once we had a full EPG some 30 mins later it was possible to skim
through the listings and find programmes that we wanted to tag for
recording. Like other Freeview PVR's it is possible to add the
programme to the record list with a single button press on the
remote.
We marked up a number of shows including a few that were on
simultaneously to test the twin tuner record capability and left it
to do it job. Meanwhile we had a hunt around Top Up TV which is the
pay TV offering on Freeview. The Thomson DTI6300 ships with a
viewing card for Top Up which enables the channels for 30 days after
which you can decide to continue at a cost of £10 a month and you
also get picture box the movie service for a month.
Sounds good when you consider that you are getting a 160gb Freeview
PVR (or DTR as top up call it) for under £100 when the Humax and
Topsfield similar devices are north of £180. However do consider
that the 1 month free trial is available from the Top Up TV website
without any purchase.
 That said the
combination of more channels (some better quality ones too) and a
Freeview PVR is a killer. Also the Thomson DTI6300 has push VOD,
whereby movies and programmes are downloaded over the air by the
unit and stored for later replay. This gives you an on demand
experience with play pause and FastFwd / rewind as if you had been
down to blockbusters.
Picture quality is impressive and the basic job of decoding and
displaying Freeview channels works well, we did note that it
struggled more than other Freeview boxes when given a poor or weak
signal. Recordings are made direct to the hard drive and you can
expect to get just under 120 hours on the disk, however this nose
dives with top up anytime switched on as the download service hives
off a chunk of storage for each service you add possibly leaving you
with just 30 hours space.
The recordings do seem of sufficiently good quality and easily
better than VHS, one note is that we did see some weird results when
fast forwarding at high speed above x32. Occasionally on restarting
playback after search out a point of whizzing through a commercial
break, the image and sound would jump around.
Living with the unit in certain rooms could be an issue as it is
remarkably noisy with high fan noise, perhaps not an issue in a
living room but in a study or bedroom it could drive you nuts. The
fans seem active even in standby mode which may account for the
rather hefty 20 watts power consumption on standby, not exactly
green and its the kind of device that has to be left on to work.
Even with these niggles the Thomson Top Up TV Plus isn't a bad box,
its not up there with the Humax or Topfield, build quality isn't as
good and the interface and features are lacking. But the bundle with
Top Up is good and the anytime service if you choose to use it is a
nice bonus.
Our view is that for under £100 (£89 as we write this) its worth
your cash just be prepared for it to be a bit noisy and occasionally
play up.
Published - 02/01/2008
More Freeview PVR Reviews -
[ Up ] [ Panasonic TUCTH100 Freeview PVR ] [ Slingbox Review ] [ Topfield Freeview PVR Review ] [ Humax 9200-T Freeview PVR Review ] [ Sagem 6280T PVR Review ] [ Thomson Top Up TV Plus ] [ Goodmans GHD8015F2 Review ] [ Sony Freeview PVR ] |
