Costco will be doing the GUFSDTR500HD for £174.99 (£205.61 inc VAT) from March 1 - 21, which is £25 off their normal price. Tempting.

Contemplating this for an elder relative who is currently on Sky and her old faithful video recorder has just packed in.

Anyone know if she can simply cancel her Sky subscription and plug in the pvr? Presumably it would just work for most channels, so what would be lost? From what she says, she has the basic Sky package(s).

Sorry, I guess that is a bit vague but it is pretty much all I currently know about her set up so what questions do I need to ask and where can I look for more information online to help her make an informed decision?

Thanks

http://www.freesat.co.uk/ gives all the information you need about channel line up on Freesat and http://www.sky.com/shop/tv/ gives you details of channels that are in various Sky packages. Basically, she will lose whatever she is paying for in the basic Sky package, together with any free channels that have not paid to be included on the Fressat EPG. But as long as she's not particulalry interested in the more minority channels then that won't really matter.

Yes, the Freesat PVR can simply replace the Sky box, however it will need two feeds from the dish as it is a twin-tuner recorder, allowing you to record one channels while watching another. I don't know if the Grundig will work with just one tuner. If your relative's Sky box is actually Sky+ (which I doubt, because you mentioned the VCR) then she will already have two feeds from the dish, otherwise she will have to get the LNB replaced if it's only a single-feed unit.

First thing is that you can cancell the sky subscription the sky box will continue to be able to view the free channels anyway and will have a few extra channels that you can't get on a freesat box. Clearly you could not record anything without a vcr or dvdr. If you go for a freesat pvr then as the sky is a basic install then if you go for the Grundig than the lnb on the dish will need changing for a quad lnb and an additional cable run to supply the twin tuners. A Humax Foxdat-hdr can be made to work pretty well (with some 2nd channel recording and third channel viewing restrictions) using only a single lnb. A Grundig pvr requires two cables and can't offer 3rd channel viewing when recording two.

Can you explain how Costco works- I looked at their website and it seemed to indicate only people who work for certain companies/professions can shop there- is that correct?

Yes,it is.
Entry is via a membership card.

The list of proffessions is fairly broad though and seems to include anyone who works in the public sector and many different trades as well your usual business owners.

You also have to pay an annual fee - I think its £25 plus VAT and you can have additional card for family member but for additional cost (spouses get one free though).

Best way is to pop into your local costco and go to their membership services

Thanks for the responses. It sounds a bit techie and if it were for myself I would probably go with it but not confident of persuading and getting it all to work well enough for someone else.

Anyone can join Costco as a private individual. The only real advantage to a trade membership is the ability to shop between 10.00am and midday which is trade only as there is little difference in the membership cost.
My local Costco had no Grundigs left yesterday.

Perhaps there will be plenty of returns when customers realise they need a quad LNB.

Why a quad, my twin does nicely?
As it happens, Costco has these Grundigs on a display stand which explains, quite clearly, what is required and offers various alternatives for installation from plug into an existing Sky dish to a full install.
However, mine is going back. After setting it up I found it had been a return. The "new install" was missing from the menu and a local postcode had already been entered. In addition, two programmes were set up to record and one already recorded. The fan is extremely noisy, no doubt the reason for the return and definitely the reason for my return.
I shall call into Richer Sounds en route to listen to a Humax for comparison.

Correct but twins are near impossible to source for Sky minidishes and so many quads are made they are cheaper anyway.

The Humax is more or less silent. I've not noticed a whisper from it in the 2 weeks I've had mine. My Thomson SKY HD box was by comparison very noisy, but not up to xbox 360 levels.

True, I have had my twin for a couple of years pending a change of receiver..
My local Sunday boot sale has a satellite stall (read Sky installer) selling the new Sky quads for £10. A bargain methinks and much smaller than the earlier versions.
I bought the Humax and it is quiet, nay silent, but sooooo,slow....25 secs to boot, is that normal?

Yep it's slow to boot, but fine after that. It ain't so long to wait though.

Yes. That's normal

As others have said yes it takes about 30 sec to boot which seems a long time to anyone used to a sky box. Console yourself with the fact that a Sky box really is not in sby and consumes a lot of power, the hdr in low power sby using less than 1 watt is essentially starting from scratch. If you boot in the 15 mins before a recordimg is due or during recording it's near instantanous.

I always found the slow boot up annoying with the Humax HDR and I don't understand why the Grundig/Goodmans DTRs manage to boot in 6 seconds (they also consume less than 1W in standby). I don't know if anyone else agrees, but my Humax always felt rather underpowered and unresponsive compared to the Grundig/Goodmans boxes.

This seems to be very expensive! Got mine through Amazon for £110 with superb back up, but model quite noisy!

Kevin

A lot can change price-wise in two years when the original post was made. Another thing has also changed - Harvard no longer hold the UK Grundig brand rights and Harvard itself is now part of a Chinese STB manufacturer.

I had one of those from Costco. First one went back after only a few weeks due to reliability issues, the second box was similarly unreliable, but we persisted with it for a while until one day it wiped the entire library. So it went back and I was really glad to have the Costco no quibble refund. The many software bugs never got sorted, which is a shame as it had quite a nice and easy to use interface.