Gadgets
Humax PVR Oct 2007
We were getting sick and tired of keeping track of video tapes and the poor quality viewing you get after you’ve used a tape a few times. Also, with the upcoming switchover to digital TV in the UK, we decided to buy a Personal Video Recorder, we were getting the digital channels through a Virgin Media set-top box, but it was too unreliable.
After researching reviews of different boxes, we decided to go for a Humax PVR-9200 (in Aust it’s a Humax-Smart). We bought it for £180 from Comet.
Help in connecting the Humax to the existing set-up of TV, DVD and VCR was available from a few websites, such as this one
The Humax finds all the available channels once you switch it on, picture quality is good on every channel (we’ve always had good reception) so no problems there.
It took about half-an-hour with the manual to figure out how to record, timeshift and so on. It’s much better than using a VCR and fiddling with tapes. You can set it to record each episode of a show and easily choose shows to record using the program guide.
We were concerned that the 160Gb hard-drive might not be big enough, but each hour of TV takes about 1.5Gb, so there’s plenty of room. We haven’t yet experimented with transferring MP3 music files onto it, or transferring TV recordings off onto a pooter, though both of these things are possible.