Samsung DVD-SH893

I've just finished decorating my living room and am I the process of upgrading my electrical goods for the new look room, the first thing I bought was a Samsung DVD SH893M as I like to watch DVD's instead of the television at night as usually there's nothing much on to watch.

I paid £149.00 from Curry's which may seem a lot to pay for a DVD player but this one has HDD recorder with a digital tuner.
The model I bought is a nice sleek black and comes with an instruction manual which is quite bulky and has about 100 pages or more, which is a little complicated to read all at once.
You have to keep refering to the booklet to be able to operate the machine as it's not a straight forward process and for me who isn't really technically minded I would have liked it to be more simpler to understand.

It has many functions and has built in digital tuner, dolby surround sound, a 160GB hard disk, a USB port for connecting external hard drives with photos, music or video, and an HDMI connector for attaching to the latest widescreen TVs.
Remote control, cable, user guide, quick-start guide.
Freeview tuner, CD ripping.

As you can see there are many functions to contend with and I had difficulty setting it up, even though I tried to follow the instruction manual I couldn't find certain functions and operate the freeview tuner. In the end I had to get someone who knew what they were doing to come and set it up for me.

On the plus side the picture and sound quality are very good and I was happy with this.

On the down side I found it did not record a set programme but was not sure if this was me just not being able to understand the opertaing system having tried a few times and not got it to do this.

There are long menus to got through to get to the record and playback function and the machine had to be on standby for timed recordings to start recording. It didn't automatically start recording, and it didn't warn you that there was a timed programme about to begin. It also didn't automatically store programmes which I thought it should have.

There is a slight delay between pressing the remote button and reaction of the recorder and I also found that the recorder froze a few times, the only way to get out of this was to turn off the power and turn it on again to start the process again.
It has froze during watching freeview too so I wasn't really impressed with this new DVD/HDD player.
You expect new things to perform perfectly.
I thought it may be a fault in the machine, but found it to be a common fault after reading some customer feedback from other sites on the product.

At the end of a unhappy relationship with this product I took it back and got a credit note to put towards something else, as I was not happy with the performance of the machine. Or the uncomprehensable instruction manual and I really wouldn't recommend you to buy this at all.