Fusion FVRT100 > Reviews (3)

For my digital terrestrial TV reception, I had been putting up with a faulty old
Philips unit from the days of OnDigital. It had seen better days and I finally decided to replace it with a current Freeview system. I had been waiting with anticipation for the Fusion FVRT100 since the beginning of the year. I had put off buying it because it had been constantly delayed and then a whole set of new boxes, with more capacity and features, appeared to be on the horizon. I finally realised that it was time to take the plunge when it became clear that nothing to rival it, for what I needed was due until next year. I bought my box from Dixons for £199.99. I eschewed the competing Thomson box because it was a touch more expensive (in the store but you can find it cheaper on some websites) and I had seen bad comments about its ambient noise on other websites.

The box is a neat silver unit. It has a front panel display which shows the channel number when using the tuner, the time in stand-by mode and basic indicators when playing a recording ("PLAY" when playing and motion indicators indicating fast forward and rewind). It has twin scart sockets and stereo phono outs for connectivity. The scart loop through operates by toggling it with the TV/AV button on the remote control. My old Philips box would pick up a signal on the scart and give it precedence over its own signal. This was fine for a simple tuner box but a recorder is more suited to active switching by the user (e.g. it allows you to watch a DVD while the box is recording).

The box only uses scart for video output. It does not add itself as a channel on the RF out but it does pass through existing analogue channels. Therefore, you cannot use the box with an older TV that does not have a scart connection or connect it to multiple TVs by using a splitter on the RF out (unless, for example, you have a VCR with a scart socket you can channel it through). This was actually not an issue for me as I was sick of my old Philips box causing interference on (channel) Five (it didn't matter which channel the RF out was tuned to, it still interfered).

The remote control does not feel very substantial but the response from the buttons is quite positive. I found that it had to be pointed more squarely at the sensor than those of my other devices. It is quite a neat design but not ideal. I think that the "channel up/down" and "volume up/down" buttons could have been made more prominent and better located. They are the same size as the other buttons and the "+" and "-" buttons have three others in between them which means that flicking up and then down channels can be a bit error prone. Another weird thing about the buttons is that they are plastic; all of my other remote controls have rubber buttons which I much prefer. Overall and after my initial misgivings, I have to admit that I am quite comfortable with it now that I have gotten used to it.

I have seen complaints about this box regarding the level of noise that it makes in operation.

The box does make a noise but it is much quieter than my VCR and I am generally unaware of it.

The big strength of this box is its dual digital tuners and onboard hard disk recording capability. The hard disk recording is augmented by the box's support of a seven-day electronic programme guide (EPG). When you first set up the box, you only get the basic Freeview EPG, which is little more than "now and next". However, if you leave the box in stand-by overnight then it will download details of programming for the next 7 days.

The process of manually recording a television programme is very intuitive. You simply change to the channel you wish to record and press the record button. A dot appears on the screen to confirm that it is recording. You can then change channels as you wish, safe in the knowledge that the original channel is being stored on the disk. The FVRT100. However, this will only work for programmes which feature in the EPG. You need to set a timed recording for non-EPG programmes.

There are two ways to set a timed recording. You can set one manually or you can use the EPG to select the programme. Both of these processes are a bit fiddly.

Setting a recording manually is quite similar to programming a recording on a VCR. The main difference is that, instead of an end time, you set duration for the recording. Holding the right button to increase the duration can be finicky as it goes quite fast while also increasing the increment between times. I found that I had to use the left button to reduce it because I kept overshooting.

Simpler, and more convenient to use, is to set the recording using the EPG. You can either go straight to the current day's listings or use the calendar to jump ahead to a day in the coming week. Once you've highlighted the programme that you want, you press the green key to record and can then adjust the recording settings (it's best to add a few minutes on either side of the recording). You then press the green key again to add it to the list of recordings. I found this to be quite an efficient process once I got used to it. The main problem was when I was getting used to setting recordings, I kept getting the buttons mixed up and found that I kept deleting my scheduled recordings. It's important to note that if you programme a recording and the time of broadcast is adjusted then your original settings will apply, it will not automatically adjust.

As opposed to a VCR, you never need to put this unit into stand-by for it to perform a scheduled recording. Due to its dual tuners, you can be watching one channel while another is recording in the background. It also allows you to watch a recording while two channels are being recorded. If you are recording two channels and attempt to watch a third then the unit cries uncle and a message appears onscreen to tell you that both of your tuners are in use. You can't really complain at that!

Recorded programmes are accessible from the unit's "Library" function. The library holds a menu of all of the recordings on the system's hard disk drive.

The first time you select the library after a TV recording has been completed, it will ask if you wish to generate the scenes for the most recent recordings. Scenes are five-minute increments that the box creates on the recordings and allow you to jump to various points in any recording. The library shows a thumbnail of the first frame of each scene to make things easier for you to choose where you wish to jump to.

The unit has a 40GB hard disk drive to store recordings. This will hold 20 hours of broadcast quality recordings or 40 hours when compressed. Compressing a recording will result in a poorer picture quality, to say the least! There are two levels of compression, LP (shabby and blocky) and EP (ultra-shabby and very blocky). To be fair, the programmes do remain watchable but my personal feeling is that a digital video recorder should result in better image quality than VHS, not worse. Even if you set a recording to be compressed, it will initially be recorded in standard (broadcast quality) mode and will only be compressed some time afterwards. If you really want to keep your hard disk clear then I suggest the following to archive it either to VHS or DVD:
- have your VHS video recorder or DVD recorder attached to Scart 2 of the Fusion
- set the Fusion's sleep timer to the duration of a programme on the disk
- set the DVDR's/VCR's input to AV1
- set quick record on the DVDR/VCR for the duration of programme
- start the Fusion programme playing
- go away and do something else!
- delete the recording off the Fusion when you return and view the VHS/DVD when it suits you.

Another option is to remove the hard disk drive and replace it with one of higher capacity. This is possible and the details of how to do so are available by performing an appropriate search on the web. However, this will invalidate your warranty (if they can prove it) and I would not advise anyone to do so. It's entirely at your own risk to attempt this.

Playing programmes from the library is simple. You simply select them on the menu and they play. If you haven't been daft enough to compress them then you will get a very impressive level of image quality. I think it is a bit lacking that there is no way to call up an on-screen info display showing which scene you are watching and the current time elapsed or remaining (pressing "pause" kind of does this but it could have been done so much better and without having to stop the recording).

You can add additional scenes to a recording while you are viewing it. This can allow you to, for example, jump past adverts on a future viewing or simply stop watching and resume at the same point later on. You can also delete the scene markers too and I discovered that deleting the first scene will effectively remove it from the recording (it's still there, it just doesn't appear when you start the title playing). There is no facility to hide scenes though, which would have been good for totally inhibiting the showing of adverts.

Fast forward and rewind cue are amazing (up to 64 times play speed), the scan lines you get with VHS tapes are not applicable!

It would have been good if they had incorporated a small increment fast forward feature of 30 seconds at a time to make skipping past adverts easier… but they didn't.

In addition to fast forward and rewind cueing recordings, you can also use the facility on live broadcasts you are viewing using the tuner. As soon as you tune into a channel, the box will record up to the last 30 minutes of the broadcast. You can then use the rewind button to timeshift backwards if you miss something, the phone goes, or any other interruption happens. Unfortunately, the box does not provide a facility to start watching a scheduled recording until it has completed the recording.

As a DTT receiver, the box boasts twin SetPal tuners. SetPal tuners are reputed to be more sensitive than many on the market and will result in less picture breakup. In my experience, this is correct and the performance is vastly superior to my previous box. The box nicely supports widescreen and fullscreen TVs. A benefit is that recordings are stored in their native aspect ratio format on the hard disk so the entire screen resolution is available, even if (for example) you switch from a fullscreen to a widescreen TV.

While the unit does not receive DAB radio broadcasts, the phono outputs and front panel display of the current channel number make it a good choice to hook up to your amplifier to listen to any of the growing number of radio stations on the Freeview platform.

Navigation of the system's menu system is straightforward. However, the background pattern is too strong for my taste and can make it difficult to immediately pick up some of the indications of which coloured buttons to press to perform which function.

The unit has no card slot and does not support Top-Up TV. How much of a drawback this is depends on your opinion of the Top-Up TV service and if you are willing to wait long enough for a DVR that supports it to hit the market (at the time of writing no DVR's support it).

As the unit is basically a computer then, unfortunately, bugs are apparent in its operation. If I had bought a VCR five years ago and it suffered from some of the issues that this box does then it would have been returned as faulty. So far, I have had blank recordings, deleted a recording to discover it still there (under the guise of another recording which I had wanted to keep but had been deleted!), various lock ups and other issues. The main annoyance so far is that I have recorded a few radio programmes (yes, I forgot to mention that it did that too!) and whereas they appear to have been recorded in their entirety, they skip at various points on playback. None of my TV recordings skip, so I'm assuming that it's a software bug.

The reason for not returning the box is simple. Over the next few months, and possibly years, the manufacturer will be releasing updates to the box's software to resolve many of these issues. These updates will be provided "over the air" with little or no intervention needed by myself. As such, features I've described in this review may change and others that I've described as lacking may be added.

Overall, I think that this is a fantastic box. It means that for the final hour of the day, I can watch whatever I want, whenever it was shown, without having to worry about video tapes and knowing that I won't have to stop because something I want to tape later on is about to start. My main objective in buying this box was for convenience and it easily provides this.

If you expect this box to be perfect then I would avoid it. However, it's initial buggy nature is more than made up for by the benefits that it provides.

* Here's an update of my experiences of the box since writing the original review (this is being written at the beginning of June 2005). As mentioned above, the manufacturer has transmitted software updates during the night. So far, two distinct updates have been transmitted and the box has indicated this with new mail messages (a mail box icon appears in the setup screen and the messages can be read with the "Read Messages" option). These updates are transmitted on ongoing basis, so any new box will receive the latest update during the next nightly transmission.

These updates have now enabled some additional features. These features include:
- subtitle recording
- chase play (i.e. you can watch a programme that is currently being recorded from the beginning)
- 14-day programme guide (as opposed to the original 7 day guide)
- some bug fixes

The first update introduced a nasty bug where, if you went to the 14th day on the programme guide and selected to view the late night programmes on a single channel, then the box would crash shortly afterwards. However, resetting the power on the box and making sure that I didn't do that again resolved the problem. This was not a major problem as the schedule 14 days ahead tended to be incomplete and subject to change. In any case, this problem was fixed with the next update.

Apart from that, the updates have made the box a far more attractive proposition. Chase play is a useful and sensible extension of the timeshifting capabilities. Being able to enable subtitle recording is fantastic for those who are hard of hearing (however, it does make the recordings consume slightly more disk space). I have found that the 14-day programme guide is far more useful for setting my recordings on a weekly basis, especially if I've just recorded something and want to set record the next episode of the same show the following week.

As mentioned in the original review, it is possible (but not advisable because you'll invalidate your warranty and will have no support if something goes wrong) to replace the hard disk in the FVRT100 to gain additional capacity. I have done this and installed a Samsung SP1604N, which is a 160GB disk, and have gone from 20 hours uncompressed recording time to around 67 hours. The FVRT100 has run so far for around 8 months with no problems. However, I've read reports of more recent disks of this type not working due to changes in the Samsung firmware so it is not advisable to perform this upgrade unless you are willing to get in touch with Samsung or do some searches on the web to discover how to regress the firmware.

Also, I have now discovered that the box outputs stereo the wrong way around. For example, when someone walks off screen to the right and slams a door, the sound comes from the left speaker. I have my FVRT100 connected to my amplifier and this is most noticeable when I am using my external speakers.

However, one great audio feature of the FVRT100 is that it will pass external audio through its phono sockets. I have chained my DVD recorder, using scart cables, in between the FVRT100 and the TV set. Having my FVRT100 in standby with my amplifier set to the FVRT100 input means that playback sound from the DVD is produced from the amp. It saves having separate connections for the DVD and FVRT100.

Another thing is that the lack of the card slot (for pay TV) has become even less relevant. Channel such as "E4", "ITV3" and "Men and Motors" have joined the Freeview service. I personally think that's enough for me to be getting on with and the Topup-TV service (the only pay TV service that a card could be used for) doesn't appeal. That's not to say that I may not be tempted by Topup-TV in the future (they would need to change their channel lineup though), I just have not had any desire for it so far.

Overall, almost 9 months on, I have absolutely no regrets about my purchase of the FVRT100 and owning it has been a real boon. Based on the software updates, I am really pleased that I did not hang around waiting for one of the other boxes that were supposedly coming out when I purchased it.