New Toys!
All of our new home entertainment equipment arrived on Thursday. Delivery from eBuyer was quick, although we did have to contact them as they tried to give us a free HDMI cable which was then out of stock and wo8ld have meant we would have to wait for everything else until the freebie was in stock.
They sorted this though and everything arrived as described. I then had the task of sorting out the spaghetti of cables and installing everything. The TV looks good, just the right size (32″), clear and bright with OK sound. It has a ridiculous number of input ports, 2 scart, component video, 3 HDMI inputs and some others that we’ll never use. We don’t get the best digital reception here so it took a bit of fiddling with the singal booster box to get it looking good, but that’s not the fault of the TV, just the fact that we live ‘on the edge’.
The DVD player looks good too. We haven’t used it much but we have tested it and it works well. It’s really small too which is quite nice. It has an SD card reader and USB port so we should be able to connect hard drives to it should we wish. It does 1080p upscaling and has an HDMI output so now we need to find some HD content so that we can see if High Def is any better than Standard Def.
The digibox HDD PVR wasn’t such a success. It was a direct replacement for our 40GB Digihome PVR that died last weekend and we already had another 80GB one that we had bought for Anna’s Mum, but this third one didn’t work. It would sort of switch on and say ‘Starting’ but it wouldn’t do anything else, so that one is going back to eBuyer for a replacement.
We now need a new cabinet or stand for them to go on which will save some room in the lounge and of course some time to sit in front of it and chill!
Our favourite piece of home entertainment technology, a digihome freeview box and HDD recorder stopped working the other day. It was a few years old so we simply decided to buy another one. After looking around it didn’t seem possible to find one that was quite as good.
At first we looked for an all in one digibox, HDD recorder and DVD recorder and did find a Wharfedale model that looked like it fitted the bill but further investigation showed that the ‘library’ of recordings didn’t actually tell you the titles of the programs you had recorded. It just listed them as ‘Title 1′, ‘Title 2′, ‘Title 3′…. Not ideal, and it sounds like a major oversight so we didn’t want to take the risk with this one, as that is what we would mainly use it for (keeping a library of TV recordings). So, as we liked the Digihome one so much we decided to stick with it and simply order a replacement with a 80Gb Hard Drive rather than the 40Gb hard drive of our broken one.
Whilst researching we were also tempted to update our now quite old TV. We fancied a slightly largr (32″) flat panel LCD TV which may give us a little more room in the lounge and a larger screen. We also thought that getting one with HDMI input ports would be a good idea. A little shopping around and we found one that suited our requirements for a little under £280.
Of course, the digibox and HDD recorder didn’t have an HDMI output so that will still connect via SCART, but it would seem as though you can’t have everything. At least you can’t if you ant to be able to afford to eat as well!
Our DVD player is about 10 years old and very temperamental too so as we couldn’t get an all in one solution we decided to by a cheap DVD player as well and found one with HDMI output (Well I have to use the HDMI ports on the TV for something!) 1080p upscaling and also a USB port and AD card slot so that we could in theory hook up a USB hard drive to it and watch HD content from that. I wonder if it will play content from my iPod as well via the USB port?
The new toys haven’t arrived yet but i’ll let you know how we get on with them once they do.
Actually, we do have the new digibox and HDD recorder and in most respects it is the same as the old one, except for a few little quirks. First up, it is a lot slower to respond so entering the EPG take a while and when you do so you can no longer hear the sound from the channel you were watching. It does allow you to record two programs at once though and of course has a lot more storage space.
We don’t spend lots of money on such things normally and all of this only came to around £350 so we’re not exactly talking high end home entertainment and cinema style quality but hopefully it’ll be better than we’re used to and will save some room in the lounge. Now all I have to do is find some HD content to see what all the fuss is about.
