Daewoo Freeview 80gb twin tuner HDD recorder £89.99 (or less)

Fatal_Swan

Here's an excellent deal at Tecno.co.uk for a Daewoo DSD9502T 80Gb freeview hard disk recorder. At £89.99 they're currently £40 cheaper than both Amazon and Ebuyer. [Edit: Price raised to £99.99 as of 6:30pm 6/12/06] This model has twin freeview tuners so you can watch one channel while recording another, or record 2 channels simultanously. Most sub-£200 freeview HDD recorders (much like the normal freeview boxes) seem to be a bit unreliable and idiosyncratic, but searching through some user reviews, the Daewoo one seems to be more stable than most.

The model's been out of stock at Tecno until this morning and the price is fantastic. It's quite a new model as far as I can tell but it looks like being a popular one so these may go very quickly. Delivery is £3.95, but free if you take the order up to £100 by buying something else for over a tenner. Also, if you click the link titled 'Affiliates' at the bottom of the Tecno page there's a voucher for 5% off.

sleepali

Thank you so much for this...just ordered one!!

BTW the 5% voucher has now changed to a £5 off next order voucher instead.

Have a lovely christmas

Derv_2

Also worth looking at this thread.

sleepali

Gone up to £99.99 now...ordered just in time

Fatal_Swan

Thanks, I hadn't seen that thread. There are a few £100 twin tuner boxes around the high street at the moment. The 80gb Digihome PVR80 from Argos springs to mind, and Maplin have got the 160gb model at the moment for £100 - that looks like an excellent deal too.

There are a few reasons why I thought that the Daewoo offer stands out. One is that (as far as I can tell) most people who've used them found that they work without issues straight out of the box, which would be a big improvement over the reliability of other models at this price. Another thing is that (I think) the Daewoo will record 2 channels simultaneously out of the box, whereas the Digifusion models need to be connected to a PC to download an update to provide this function (and there are consequences to do with the EPG not working as smoothly afterwards). Though I'm not an expert, so please correct me if I'm wrong. Finally, the Daewoo just looks nicer than all the budget models I've seen (the Digihome in Argos looks straight out of the 70s). Shallow, yes, but a factor you might want to take into account if it's going to be given as a present, say.

Yes, on Tecno's homepage the Daewoo is now showing at £99.99! Hope anyone who wanted one got in there quickly... Though clicking the 'Affiliates' link still seems to give me the 5% code rather than £5 off the next order.

barneydog

You are right about the feature of recording 2 channels at once is important, I couldn't do without it, but you are wrong about the digifusion. My digifusion FVRT100 will record 2 channels simultaneously whilst playing a previous recording. Mind you with the problems I had with it when i bought it 11 months ago (appalling firmware, now updated and weedy power supply, replaced free of charge) I wouldn,t have recommend anyone buy one.
apparrently the new ones are better though.
Now waiting for the warranty to run out and am going to rip out the 40gb hdd and replace with a spare 120gb, plenty of space then!