Samsung BD-DT7800 Freeview+ HD Tuner

[bobbarley]

I'm moving at the end of the week and unfortunately Sky+ HD isn't coming with me.  The new place only has one sky connection, so I can only record/pause/rewind one channel, thus defeating the object to be honest.  Plus it's £32 which is a lot for almost 900 channels of crap. 

Did some research online and bought myself a Samsung BD-DT7800 tuner.  Review below.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/samsung-bd-dt7800_TV-recorder---set-top-box_review

First impressions of the box are very good!  Set-up was very easy once I got the language set to English.  Was set to Czech out of the box, my fault for getting it cheap on eBay from a Czech seller!  Channels were all found in no time and the picture quality is pretty good, the HD looks awesome, easily as good as Sky I'd say.

The box comes with a 500GB Seagate hard drive which should be plenty for the average user.  My Sky box had 250GB and I never managed to fill it.  Also, the Samsung box allows you to connect USB drives for viewing photos, music as well as DIVX files.  It has DLNA built in so I can stream movies from my DNLA enabled NAS server over the network to the box.

Speaking of which, I had no idea the box has wireless LAN built in!  When did PVR boxes start doing that?!  It took about a minute to find and connect to my home network wirelessly.  It also has the Samsung Smart HUB, so I can view Facebook, Twitter etc, and also stream HD content from the BBC iPlayer and Lovefilm.

So far the only negative I've come across with the box is the noise.  It has a 50m fan at the back to keep the internal gubbins cool.  Unfortunately said fan is very loud, you can still hear it when watching TV which the sound set to a medium level.  I've ordered a new 50mm Fractal Designs silent fan, hopefully once I've swapped them over the sound won't be an issue any more.

I'm a bit of a Samsung fan boy having already got a Samsung TV and blue ray player, however I have to say I am very pleased with this box.  It seems to have all the bases covered and as I managed to get it quite cheap it will have paid for itself over Sky in less than 5 months.

Would recommend 

[DubFan]

Looks like a good unit apart from this:

And on the Freeview front, this is as comprehensive a feature set as you can expect to find, besides one notable exception – its inability to record two channels simultaneously. That’s because only one of the tuners is linked to the hard disk drive, but the second tuner at least lets you watch one channel while recording another. Samsung hopes to rectify this on future models but for now it remains a frustrating limitation.

Only able to record one channel?!
Bit of a blunder on the functionality front, especially when the rest of the spec/features look so good, it could even tempt me away from my Humax PVR if it wasn't for that.

[bobbarley]

I wasn't fussed by that really. I've never needed to record two things at once before, it's hard enough finding one good programme to watch 

[Billy213]

You say that now but you know if you buy there will ALWAYS be two things you want to record. 

[Jay]

You say that now but you know if you buy there will ALWAYS be two things you want to record. 

On freeview? 

Freesat HD maybe

[bobbarley]

I used to have Freesat HD, twas rubbish!!

[Jay]

I used to have Freesat HD, twas rubbish!!

Movies4Men is great, as is the horror channel 

[DubFan]

We very frequently have 2 things recording at once, especially as I make my wife record the things I don't want to watch (like Don't Tell the Bride).
It's handy if you have some series you like, so you have it set to record every episode, then a movie (or sporting event) is on one week but clashes with your series.
We tend to record everything we like and watch at our own pace because a) you never know if you'll get interrupted by kids/phone/etc and b) it means you can skip the adverts.

[bobbarley]

I'm too impatient, if it's on then I need to watch it