Thomson Top Up TV – 160GB Freeview Digital TV Recorder – With Free Top Up TV Trial

I bought this at the beginning of the week and already have found it of great use and also so easy to use. As soon as I plugged it in it was operational and scanned the channels in very quickly.

Some reports say that the machine is noisy I must admit that I havent noticed this as yet (despite living in a studio flat) and I leave it in standby all the time when not in use so that it just records when I’ve set things up.

Bug bears. Ive found that it has locked up a couple of times which had tio be fixed by resetting the machine which takes about a minute to correct. I didnt buy it for the Top-up TV although maybe in the future Ill use this option. It still downloaded some programs and I may have turned the options of down load too quickly as I can get them anymore. Top-up seem to use a large volume (about half) of the recording space which appears to be about 70 Hrs in total when turned on, and even when most are off I feel it still trys to take some of the recording space. Mind you 70 Hrs is allot of recording time. No electronic panel on the front (just LEDS) so now missing a clock under the TV that was always useful, but there is one on the menu screens.

All in all so far Ive been happy with the machine, havent tested the series link yet to see how well that works, that will show over the next couple of weeks. Even better was the bargin price of under £80 and I can still order my months free trial (I think) of Top-up.

Addition to review August 2008. Just found out that I possibly should have a card which I dont have now dont know how to get one still waiting to hear back from Top Up TV to see if they can send me one. Want to get the free setanta season that they are offering.
Rating: 4 / 5

I have owned this DTR for 4 months now and it has performed fine. After a day or two it updated to the latest firmware. The menus are easy to use and the remote control is simple and functional. There is a one touch record function, series record, 14 day TV guide, time guard and you can pause and rewind live TV. All of these features have worked fine and all scheduled recordings were stored to the hard drive with no problem. When playing back recordings I was very pleased. They were pretty much the same quality as the original broadcast. (This will obviously depend on how good your reception strength is in your area). The programme library stores all your recordings neatly and has a video thumbnail preview for each saved programme and lets you know which ones have been previously viewed.

The hard drive is a little noisy, but it’s not really that bad! Mine is housed in a cabinet though, and I own an Xbox 360……now that’s noisy! Rewinding or forwarding recordings can sometimes be a bit annoying as it will skip to another part of the recording for no apparent reason. I did take advantage of the free Top Up TV trial, but was not impressed. The machine downloads selected programmes each night and stores them on the hard drive. A few nights the programmes didn’t even download and I received a load of messages stating that the recording had failed for each programme. To be honest the majority of stuff that downloaded was pretty bad and definitely not worth paying out for every month. I cancelled the trial at the end of the free month, and changed the settings on the machine to disable Top Up TV which allows me to use most of the hard drive space for personal recordings.

On the whole, it’s a decent enough DTR at an affordable price. The 160GB hard drive holds nearly 80 hours of recordings which is pretty good. Top Up TV was very disappointing, but apart from that it’s a really handy piece of equipment to own.

Rating: 4 / 5

Bought this in november so far pretty good, the timeshift function is nice, you can set it upto 60 minutes and record what you have rewinded in timeshift i.e rewind back 10 minutes and record from that point. The library has thumbnails of what you recorded when you scroll down through your recordings. Record to channels at the same time record one and record the one your watching your can’t change channel if you do that. TopupTV deactivate those channels to get the full hard drive space (70 Hours) Remote control looks very simialr to sky+ and can control your tv volume and mute button, check the tv codes thatcome with the manual. Latest software version 2.88 seems to have got rid of any problems people had, you can upgrade the hard drive (ide ATA 3.5 inch) for more recording time overall a pretty useful box
Rating: 4 / 5