Humax PVR-9300T

My 9300T started giving trouble just 3 weeks out of warranty, approached Humax for advise, they told me to retune which I did several times. No improvement so phoned again and they said it must be signal strength, and that there was nothing they could do about it, avoid like the plague.

Bought a Humax PVR9300T about 14 months ago. Just as it went out of warranty the recorder schedule (things I wanted to record) kept clearing itself each morning.

Spoke to Humax support who were completely un-helpful in trying to fix the problem. Looking at web forums the clearing of the schedule is a common problem that was introduced by a faulty software download by Humax.

The best part of it is that Humax customer care told me just to buy a new one. So a) they have no confidence in their products and b) who would be stupid enough to think I'd be willing to be stung twice by poor good.

My advice is to avoid Humax products at all cost.

Constantly freezes with no cure or help from the makers. How they get off with producing this junk is beyond me. Is there no consumer protection from these garbage manufacturers ? Avoid at all costs, complete rubbish.

Positives ; easy to set up - easy to set recordings.

Negatives ; no HD, does not reset screen TV to correct aspect for programmes recorded in other than widescreen ; limited control options.

Never finishes the programe I have taped,sometimes misses an hour of it.

Sometimes it misses the beginning.

Never really been any good.

I bought the Humax PVR9300T (500GB version) after reading a cross section of reviews. It seems the noisy fan has been fixed with an over the air software update and these are automatically included in the latest shipped models resulting in a very quiet new machine. Sure, it still suffers from a few small niggles like the EPG menu only having a 2 hour visual overview and recordings sometimes being clipped in the first and last minute but this can often efffect other machines as this can result from early or late digital embedded signals from some of the less organised channels. It happens to me in maybe 1 in 10 recordings but you can add a manual overlap buffer of up to 5 minutes to help overcome this.

It's the more innovative features that sold this machine for me. Buttons like advert skip for up to 120 seconds, a button that transposes your recordings onto the channel you’re watching so you can watch while flicking through your recordings for ease of choice. A small viewing window allows you to keep watching the current channel while you flick through the programme menu. There are so many useful short cut features on this basic priced model that it would take me some while to list them all on here.

Reading some of the other reviews it would seem that Humax have got their act together, listened to customers, and produced updates that fixed most of the more important problems cited by customers. From my experience of my new machine bought in December 2012 this does seem to have ironed out the main problems. This seems to be a perfectly good and innovative freeview plus digital recorder at what seems a very competitive price compared to other models in the Humax stables and amongst its main competition.

I had a simple cheap PVR which became unreliable after a couple of years so after reading some encouraging reviews I purchased the PVR-9300T. It fell at the first hurdle. It took over three hours to populate the program guide and then for only about 5-6 days, not the eight quoted in the manual. I thought, however, that once it had loaded it would stay that way, but sadly no. If you leave this device on standby, or switch it off, it completely wipes the program guide and you have to spend another three hours waiting for it to load again!

A truly awful piece of kit which is £159.00 down the drain as there is no point in replacing it with a new version of the same dire design.

An awful bit of kit. My wife has the big hump with me because I set this this piece of rubbish to record the new series of Lewis. She asked me just now to check that it had done so and it has no recorded programmes in its memory after March 2012! I was also recording the Channel 4 series Homeland and it only recorded 10 out of the 12 episodes, rendering it unwatchable. It frequently freezes, items on the menu disappear and reappear at various times and the EPG takes hours to populate if the machine has been on standby for a few days. I plan to take a hammer to this thing as soon as its replacement has been decided upon and purchased. And no, Humax, it will definitely NOT be one of your crummy machines!

Bought from Amazon. Followed set up instructions to the book.

Got absolutely nothing except to lose all my TV channels.

No response from any of the buttons when pushed. On the unit and the remote.

This will be going back for a refund.

AVOID AT ALL COSTS. IT IS A TOTAL LOAD OF RUBBISH.

A very disappointing purchase, despite high recommendations elsewhere. The machine continually froze and needed resetting; ignored scheduled recordings; regularly failed to even provide an EPG; and it cut off recordings before they had finished. Unreliable product. It's been sent back for a refund. I wouldn't buy another.