Aldi - Technosonic PVR £99.99 - Freeview

kcegginton

Thanks dobbo for your thoughts - very helpful.

Not everyone is happy with the Fusion 200:

http://www.pvruk.co.uk/reviews.cfm?attributes.ProductID=20&Model=FVRT200

Lost programmes, noisy fan...

Have some patience, learn to enjoy the journey.

Clive.

Lorian

dobbo wrote:

on this board, buying a *new* pvr for £100 that is so full of bugs that it is useless, and kidding themselves that they can *live* with it or figure out a workaround to compensate for its failings. Don't kid yourselves: NO software update to fix the myriad bugs and no, TechnoTrend is NOT Technosonic although some *assume* that it must be.
Take your Technosonics back to Aldi, buy a working Fusion 200 instead.

I don't see anyone saying they are planning to "live with it or figure out a workaround" but waiting a few days to see if a fix turns up is no problem.

It think it would be pretty annoying if someone took their Technosonic back and forked out an extra £60 or so for another make and found the technosonic were fixed a week later. I guess if you need it for Christmas things might be a bit different.

Searcher2

Lorian wrote:

I don't see anyone saying they are planning to "live with it or figure out a workaround" but waiting a few days to see if a fix turns up is no problem.

It think it would be pretty annoying if someone took their Technosonic back and forked out an extra £60 or so for another make and found the technosonic were fixed a week later. I guess if you need it for Christmas things might be a bit different.

Mmmm. There is a big difference in the Fusion 200 though. It is twin tuner (as is the 101) with 14 day EPG, can record 2 programs at once AND watch a recorded program, can start watching a program already being recorded... OK the 101 may have a better skip feature... but I am expecting £50 of extra features over the 101 for the extra £50 I am paying.

Jaxer

Not all is lost!

The first one I bought had the "No Signal" problem that seems so widespread. I exchanged this for a replacement (if at first you don't succeed ..... etc etc).

This one is working almost without problem - I've used it over 3 days, and been pretty happy with the results. Except for the following issues, it's worked as well as I would have wanted :

a) On the first day the "time-display" remained static when it went into standy-by which meant it didn't record a programme I had lined up. This hasn't repeated itself, and I've sucessfully recorded several programmes at differing times in and out of stand-by, in addition to using the time-shift function simultaneously.

b) I've also had two occasions where I've lost all sound across all channels (it was in the middle of a "recording" at the time). This was solved by stopping the recording, and going in and out of stand-by. An annoying nuisance, but it seems to be infrequent, so bearable at the moment. Also, when I played back the recording itself, there wasn't any actual loss of sound in the programme.

c) It occasionaly switches channels if I use the TV remote (for a Hitachi TV) which again is more of an irritation than anything too annoying.

There are obviously widespread quality problems, but when it works as expected, it seems a bargain for £99 - and it's virtually silent compared to some of the reviews of other boxes with people complaining about fan-noise. For what it's worth, I've got a (portable) TV sitting directly on it, and it's on top of a DVD player, so it can't be too sensitive to electro-magnetic interference !

dc

dobbo wrote:

on this board, buying a *new* pvr for £100 that is so full of bugs that it is useless, and kidding themselves that they can *live* with it or figure out a workaround to compensate for its failings. Don't kid yourselves: NO software update to fix the myriad bugs and no, TechnoTrend is NOT Technosonic although some *assume* that it must be.
Take your Technosonics back to Aldi, buy a working Fusion 200 instead.

Well I took my non working, buggy Fusion 200t back for a refund after it developed dimenture. Seemed to think it had 117% free when it should have been nearer 50% free, hours of lost recordings, so this technology is far from perfect.
Dont *assume* Fusion to be perfect, in the pecking order they are well down the list of reliable product suppliers, even though they do have a good Pace pedigree.

dc

Jaxer wrote:

and it's virtually silent compared to some of the reviews of other boxes with people complaining about fan-noise. For what it's worth, I've got a (portable) TV sitting directly on it, and it's on top of a DVD player, so it can't be too sensitive to electro-magnetic interference !

That is because it has no fan, which may be a cause of the intermitent faults, by allowing components to overheat.
All in all I think the 101 has posibilities and stands a chance of its current ills being cured.

Does anyone know if Key will be supplying brand new replacements or repaired recorders?

Lorian

dc wrote:

Does anyone know if Key will be supplying brand new replacements or repaired recorders?

No. They have promised me (and a lot of others) a call back though.

Looking at a few posts over at DS, it's possible that technotrend (a german company) wrote the software for the technosonic so there is a small hope of an OTA software fix.

ToAoB

Does anyone knows if the upcoming fix will also enable it to record subtitles as well?

Eager_Beaver_2

And the moral to this story is ......

Buy Sky+ (....especially Sky+ 160)

OR

If you already have a Sky or Digi Box buy a TIVO which is still the best PVR by a mile....you can upgrade it to 500GB (imagine how many episodes of Corrie you can get on that), access it from your PC, set up season passes that don't disappear when a program misses a week or even when the series finishes, update over broadband, 2 week EPG....I could go on.

DogtanianUK

Very useful post there Eager_Beaver, moral of the story is to stop trying to get your £100 pvr to work and instead spend £399 on the Sky+ 160 or £250 on a Tivo? I used to have terrible reliability problems with my old Fiat Punto, I realise now I should have just bought that Bugati I had my eye on.

I'll be holding onto this box until the new year, hopefully the rumoured over air update after christmas will improve things - if not then the box can always go back then, nothing lost and presumably much cheaper PVRs to be had in January.

I'd be interested to hear how the box is behaving with the lid off, could this be a simple overheating problem? If so then maybe a few minutes with a borrowed dremel 'modding' some air vents might be the answer.