Over here, Mike talks about his experiences with a Humax PVR 9200T – and it seems he rather likes it. It’s a 160GB personal video recorder that can handle the UK’s digital TV implementation, Freeview. It has two tuners which makes it rather useful.

Whilst I’m in the market for a PVR, 160GB probably isn’t big enough, so I’m holding off for now…although the Humax units are very tempting indeed.

So in the short-term, I’m using a DVD recorder. We plumped for a Samsung unit, pretty much in keeping with the Samsung TV that we bought some five years ago. It’s a great little unit, there’s some fan noise, but you have to mute the TV (and silence any screaming baby’s that you may have close by) in order to hear the fan…it has that satisfying “Hitchhiker‘s” hum about it (“With a satisfied hum and a click the door closed behind him”)

Recording is now a delight – no more fast forward, play, rewind loops to find the right spot to record. The unit create a disc menu that makes navigation so much easier than standard the VCR. And we can watch a DVD whilst the VCR is recording or vice versa. So far I’ve been using Philips DVD+RWs, I reckon for day-2-day re-use DVD-RAM might be the better route.

The only thing it lacks is a digital TV tuner…surely it’s about time we got a magical all-in-one unit that combines VCR, DVD recording, digital TV, a nice big hard disc and a USB port? Now that would be nice’n’useful…however since the manufacturers of the individual bits of kit want to make a profit, we’ll have to wait a while before we see it! I’m sure that there’s a conspiracy theory going on here somewhere!

Anyway, Samsung VR320, it’s a great unit, especially if you can source it for less than £180 🙂