Technology Lifestyle Philips DVR5100 Personal Video Recorder - REVIEW | Philips DVR5100 Personal Video Recorder - REVIEW |
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| by Adam Turner | |
| Friday, 20 July 2007 | |
      
The DVR5100 features twin high definition tuners and is capable of recording two shows at once. The 160GB hard drive is good for around 23 hours of HD content or 44 hours of SD content (the DVR7100 features a 250GB drive). It allows chasing playback, letting you watch the start of a show while you're still recording the end of it. There's no onboard DVD player/recorder and no Ethernet for connecting to your network and the internet. While you're recording television you can also watch something you recorded previously. Unfortunately the remote control uses the same stop button to stop playing and to stop recording. It doesn't ask you to confirm when you press stop while recording, so you need to be careful in such a situation that you don't accidentally press stop twice - stopping the playback and then inadvertently stopping recording. To stretch the player to its limits, we recorded Nine and Ten's 1080i high definition morning shows simultaneously whilst playing back an 1080i recording. Despite the load, the player didn't miss a beat and both morning show recordings were flawless. Pressing the "HDD" button calls up your list of recordings, with a preview window playing the highlighted file to make it easy to find the show you're looking for. When you press record, the DVR5100 checks the program data embedded in the broadcast signal and automatically sets itself to stop recording when the show finishes. This might sound like a useful feature but in Australia it's actually a major drawback because the television networks refuse to stick to their own schedules. As such if you press record on the DVR5100 and walk away, chances are you'll miss the last few minutes of the show. Annoyingly you can't disable this feature or add an automatic margin for error, the only way around it is to remember to press record twice, which adds an extra 30 minutes to the recording time. The DVR5100 sports a range of outputs including composite, component and s-video as well as HDMI. It also features stereo analogue audio jacks, as well as optical and coaxial digital audio outputs for connecting to a surround sound amplifier. There's also an RF loop out. The player can also upscale standard definition content to 1080i via a HDMI connection. Like most PVRs, Philips' offering lets you pause live TV - buffering it to the hard drive. When you resume you can fast forward, rewind or jump in 10 second increments - useful for skipping advertisements. Unlike some PVRs, it doesn't automatically buffer whatever you're watching so you can't pause live TV and then rewind it. This might sound like a luxury feature you can live without, but if you've ever roadtested a PVR with an automatic buffer you'd be reluctant to give it up. Talking about the buffer raises another annoying quirk with the DVR5100. A trap with many PVRs is that the buffer is cleared when you change channel. If you pause a live football match to make a coffee and then resume watching 10 minutes later, it's easy to forget that you're not watching live TV. When you get to an ad break, you have to fight the urge to flick channels. If you do change channel you'll lose what was in the buffer so when you flick back to the football you'll have jumped to the present with no way to get back the 10 minutes you missed. If you're watching the buffer on the DVR5100 and you try to change channel, it asks you if you want to save the 10 minutes of the game that's in the buffer. This sounds good, but unfortunately there's no way to abort and go back to watching the buffer. If you do save the buffer and change channel, the DVR5100 stops buffering the live broadcast so when you flick back to the game you've missed 10 minutes of the game (which is now stored on the hard drive as a recording) plus the few seconds since you changed channel (which is lost for good). So what do you do now? The best option is to hit record, then play the 10 minutes recorded from the buffer, then start playing the recording of the game while it continues to record the end. If that sounds complicated and annoying, that's because it is. The ability to abort a channel change would have saved you all that trouble. PVRs are supposed to make you life easier, but unfortunately the Philips DVR5100 just has too many annoying quirks too earn pride of place in your lounge room.
PRICE $AU849.99 PROS twin HD tuners CONS too many annoying quirks CONTACT Philips www.philips.com.au |
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