Catching Up

The DVD Recorder, Panasonic's EZ-27EB, arrived last November but, aside from the purchase of 40 rewritable discs which serve as videotape replacements, the mass transfers I envisaged have not happened.

However, it was heartwarming to realise that my QED Quenex range of cables for enhancing my Analogue signal have not gone to waste. Any other Freeview device could be looped into the second AV port using the RVR extension lead, a fact never publicised by What Hi Fi, and you could do "twin tuner" using separate boxes. My year-old Freeview box purchased in an emergency won't go to waste.

The AV forums veterans swear by the model up from mine, the EX77 or EX87, due to the 160 and 250Gb hard disks they contain. My view is, aside from a Widescreen flag issue which had not been corrected by firmware updates when I bought, is that coming from the PC side of things I would like to know the brands of hard disk supplied inside combination players. Although Maplin sells a Freeview tuning box into which you can install your own drive, this currently remains an EIDE unit at a time when SATA drives are taking over.

If, for example, you own a PS3, it's likely to be a Toshiba hard disk as shown by one modder's dismantling of a console. If you had such knowledge anyway, you would expect Toshiba every time rather than the company having the ability to sell you the cheap and cheerful brand instead, for the same fat price.

As such, it's only if you are planning to buy a DVD and Hard disk combination recorder from Toshiba or Samsung, that you can be more sure about firm selling the player also having manufactured the hard disk inside. Strangely, I am not as worried about whichever disk may feature inside an Xbox 360, since there are a myriad of reasons why this machine could go wrong (and it has technically failed on a high enough scale to cause mass warranty extension). The same mindset applies to the Ipod - it's a portable, you might drop it and cause it to fail, but that's what extended warranties are for.

It's a marketing angle that hasn't been exploited; I know that Western Digital hard drives have personally proven more reliable in the last decade of using them compared to other brands. Whoever marketed this fact, or if WD itself wished to market a PVR in the UK as it has in other territories, would be the next company to get my money.