Freeview Frustration

Freeview frustrations The more observant among you will know that we've recently moved from the world of rented accommodation into the scary realm of home ownership.

Whilst renting our last house, we had the fortune to have a pretty nice widescreen tv with integrated freeview (which worked somewhat sporadically, due to rather poor tv reception.)

Since moving, we found we were missing the goodness of BBC3 and BBC4, (we were even missing TMF, which was somewhat of a shock) so I ended up succumbing and buying a freeview box (of course the fact that E4 is now free, and the new series of Big Brother had just started had nothing to do with it!)

However, the ride wasn't too smooth...

Philips DTR500

This was the first box I purchased a few weeks ago, for £59.95 from Tesco (mostly because they were out of cheaper boxes, and I decided I'd rather go for a well known brand name than for something unknown.)

First impressions

Looks wise, it's top-notch - one of the most stylish looking boxes out there (most freeview boxes look incredibly plasticy.) The remote too is well made and solid feeling.

Setup

Installation went pretty quickly too, all the required cables were included in the box, and the channel search only took a few minutes to get us up and running.

Features

The Philips box is a pretty well-featured box, it has the new 7 day TV guide (far better than the "now/next" feature most older boxes have.) and has a good looking and nicely laid out interface.

General Use

So far this box sounds great, but it's in general use that it begins to fall down - this box is blighted with lots of intermittent problems. (and apparently lots of people have been suffering.)
The problems suffered (in no particular order) are as follows:

• Sound suddenly cutting out on the channel being watched (changing the volume using the box's volume control would make it come back for a few seconds, then go again)
• Picture suddenly going black on BBC channels (this seemed to happen at the same time as the "press red" graphic appeared at the top of the screen)
• Complete loss of all channels (sometimes turning the box off at the mains would make them come back right away, other times they'd eventually come back after the box being left off for a while)
• Teletext / interactive options take ages to load (sometimes 20 seconds or more)
• Interactive option on E4 not found at all (meaning you can only switch to the Big Brother Live feed by manually re-tuning to channel 705)

Overall

I must say I was seriously disappointed with the Philips box, which was bought because it was a well known (and well respected) brand. Feature wise it was excellent, but it was let down by a myriad of faults.
I actually owned two of these, as I took the first one back hoping it was just an isolated fault with that unit, only to find that the replacement suffered in the same ways.

DigiFusion Fusion FRT101

The second box I tried was a brand I hadn't heard of, but it was the same price as the Philips box I had returned, and featured the same 7 day guide, along with a neat "30 second rewind" feature for an "TiVO style" instant replay of live tv.

First impressions

Compared with the other boxes on review, the Fusion and its remote both felt very cheap and plasticy. Also the box just contained the unit, a manual and its power lead - no aerial or scart lead was supplied.

Setup

Setup was very easy, although it took a long time to search for channels. I also had to dig out cables of my own as, as mentioned above, it didn't come with its own Scart or aerial lead.

Features

The 7 day guide features here too, along with the 30 second replay gimick (which would probably be of most use to sports fans.) The interface seemed a bit garish, and not too logically laid out in many places.

General Use

Again, this is where it all falls down.

• This box utterly failed to pick up the BBC channels for me (despite the fact that they were picked up happily by the other two boxes on test) and this lead to other problems. When parked on a channel without signal (e.g. #1 - BBC1,) it would lock up for a few seconds before it'd let you skip channels.
• Interactive services were even slower to load than on the Philips box.

There might've been other problems, but this was packed away and returned well before it had had much usage, due to the fact that an inability to pick up BBC made it almost completely useless!

Overall

Overall the fusion box was utterly unimpressive - it felt very cheap compared to the Philips box that I'd lived with for a few days, and seemed far rougher around the edges (even taking the earlier machine's faults into account!)

Sony VTXD800U

The third and (currently) final box I bought was this Sony unit, costing £99.99 from Curry's. Whilst £40 more expensive than the other two boxes on trial, and well over double the price of many of the cheaper units, I'd read nothing but praise for this machine, so decided that maybe it was worth a bit extra to get something that does the job properly.

First impressions

This box is primarily designed to stand vertically next to your TV (I presume) which is fine if you've got your TV on a large table, but we haven't, so it has to sit horizontally under the TV (along with the DVD player, video, and consoles when they're set up.)
It's not a major quibble, but it doesn't quite look right sat horizontally (the text is all sideways for one thing), but it's still a very sleek looking unit.

Setup

Setup went without a hitch. All the cables I needed were included in the box, and the channel scan took just a few seconds to complete (unlike the cheaper units that took far longer.)

Features

Like the other two boxes on review, the Sony unit features a 7-day guide, although unlike the other two that just display what programme is showing for each channel at a given time, this unit displays a proper timeline showing the exact start times for programs over a two hour period that you can scroll forwards through time to see what's on within the next week. The ability to list programs by classification is also great for finding specific types of programs (such as movies.)

General Use

So far, I've yet to find anything that I can really complain about. The remote control is a typical Sony affair, in that it's just a bit on the big side, but it's sensibly laid out and has buttons for controlling your TV too (you can change channel, volume, and put it into standby) which means your TV remote can sit out of the way.
Reception is great (getting full signal for the BBC channels that the Fusion box claimed was poor) and there's very little breakup when the signal does drop.
Interactive services seem to work flawlessly, and appear on screen after only a second or two of loading (far faster than any other receiver I've seen), and the on screen guide is also far superior to that offered by other receivers.

Overall

Overall, of the three boxes I've used (and the old integrated digital tuner in the Grundig TV we had when we were renting,) I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the Sony box. Ok it's at least twice as expensive as some of the cheapo units you can get, but sadly it seems that handling the decoding of the digital freeview signal is something that is just far too complex to be left to a cheap box.

Conclusions

I feel the BBC's adverts telling us how simple Freeview is to set up are somewhat misleading, if people buying cheaper boxes are going to end up going back to the shop to buy a scart cable, and then find half the channels break up, and the interactive services are too frustrating to be usable.

Also, stand alone Freeview recievers will have quite a limited timespan anyway, since with the government planning on turning off the analogue transmitters in the next few years, pretty soon all new TVs will have a Freeview reciever built in.