Through some work discounts and credit card affiliation schemes I can get the Humax 9200 from Currys for £165.

I seem to be able to get the Topfield for £235 so is the toppy worth £70 more?

I really like the sound of TAPs and hooking it up to the network but the heat issue troubles me a bit as my wife is paranoid about the house going up in flames as it is!

Is the Humax tolerable or is it really a case of £70 well spent. Bias expected but I know there are a few people that have used both so given the discount on the Humax what would you do?

I've had my Hummy for nearly 8 months now. As a consumer device its excellent. Don't bother with jpeg viewer. MP3 player is "OK", transfers to a PC via USB work but aren't lightening fast.

If you want something simple your wide can use - choose a the Hummy. If you want to spend £70 more so you can play with TAPS choose Topfield.

What heat issue? There really isn't one; the Toppy doesn't have a fan, but it doesn't get uncomfortably hot - though I wouldn't recommend putting it in a cabinet with no ventilation, or blocking the holes in the case.

Nigel

Until we move house the box will be on the floor (believe me, that doesn't look as poo as it sounds).

I'd read that the box was uncomfortably hot elsewhere but maybe that was a result of the hot weather recently.

I absolutely definitely will be transferring recordings off the unit to either divx or burn to DVD for keepsies, does that sway it? I suppose what I'm saying is I want the toppy but feel bad on blowing the extra £70.

If transferring files is important then, yes, I'd say that swings it in favour of the Toppy. There are some reliability issues with the USB on the Humax and the supplied software; apparently it's better using a third party tool, but I'm not sure if that's graphical yet or command line only.

The Toppy is reliable at transferring, can do it in both directions without issues - so you can copy files back on to it if you wish later - and there's third part support for Linux and Mac too, which is used to enable the networking.

Nigel.

You could always buy another twin tuner PVR with the left over £70 for another room. See the Fusion threads. I appreciate this is a toughie given you have such an opportunity at the Currys price. Even without this exadurated price difference there are loads of people who consider being able to customise the toppy with taps worth the extra - so you can do things a lot like series link on SKY+ and add a 14 day EPG that can be saved to disk etc, and generally be able to choose the way it looks in use from a variety of different styles.
Last edited by marcdavis : 22-08-2006 at 13:46

I think this is something often overlooked on the Toppy, as there really is no other twin-tuner Freeview PVR that has this ability...

With the latest firmware and its fast population of the EPG, the addition of a single straightforward TAP means that you can probably say goodbye to the manual setting of the vast majority of your timers - this, at least, is my experience. The free UK Auto Scheduler allows you to define search keywords from which timers are then automatically set based on the EPG content. Like the Simpsons? Enter "Simpsons" as a keyword search and you're done - UK AS will set timers for you in the background. On its own, I would be tempted to say this is worth a £70 premium, largely on the basis that I would now never want to be without this. Having said that, you then have all the other TAPs that you can add to the "benefits" list, 99% of which are free. Another TAP I wouldn't be without is MP3 Jukebox, a genuinely usable MP3 player with album art display, etc. etc. etc.
Last edited by jon_c : 22-08-2006 at 14:26

Yeah the toppy is a powerful machice.

The Sky+ like features with TAPs is brillant.

Also being able to customise the interface to suit what you like or want. A bit like a computer. Don't like one graphics program, just load another.

I decided to stop sitting on the fence and went for a 250GB Topfield!

Fingers crossed it's everything I hope it will be as I'm getting shot of NTL straight after.

If your family is anything like mine was, when we ditched Sky I'm sure they'll whinge for a while, until they get used to having less channels but utilising the recording functions instead - its a bit of a culture shift that can take people a while to deal with.