Free(View) At Last!

Well, after months of dithering around, we finally went out and bought a Topfield TF5800PVR so we could get Freeview and get rid of our VCR and the pile of VHS tapes cluttering up the living room. I was waiting to to see what Humax would come up with in their new pvr-9200T and to see if Topfield were going to release a network compatible model but they haven't and the Humax doesn't match up so a TF5800PVR it had to be.


The "Toppy" is a brilliant bit of television kit. It comes with two FreeView tuners, which means that you can watch one channel, while recording another. In fact you can watch one and record two others at the same time with it. It's also got a 160Gb hard drive, which translates to about 80 hours of recordings and that's equivalent to about 20 240 minute VHS tapes and that's a lot of tape. There's a 250Gb model available but I really couldn't see us filling it but I suppose if you were a TV series addict, you might. On top of all that, you can enhance the functionality of the box by installing Topfield Application Programs (TAPs).

Now if only FreeView was actually any good :-(