Whereas the Humax is notorious for losing recordings and corrupting the hard disk. Rather serious faults for a PVR.

BTW of the four points you make the first has some truth, the second is subjective, the third is plain wrong and the last is as true as it is for a Humax.

My first point is clearly true.

My second point is true

Our machine is so noisy we often have to stop because we can't hear the sound coming from the television.

The Humax I've used has auto-padding.

I will say it again. Your second point is subjective. I find the EPG of the Topfield superior to that of the Humax. Faster to populate and easier to navigate. And that is a fact. But I accept that my experience may be coloured by a career using machinery with very user unfriendly controls and vastly more complicated than anything you will have ever got near to.

You are unlucky to have a noisy machine but that is not common.

I've sold about 50 of them, they all seem to respond fine to the remote, incuding the 2 5800s and the 5810 I have personally used.

EPG, you of course cound do a better job. What do you want it to look like? It has the program info, you want it to make intelligent conversation and play the clarinet?

HDD devices are noisy, my lappy is humming away here, so is my toppy, so is my SkyHD box, which also has a poxy EPG.

My Sky box does have the ability to MANUALLY pre set padding, which is then constant when you set recordings. That would be nice I guess, but to the normal user of a Topfield, installing a TAP is child's play.....

I assume you are talking about a 9200? If so I also assume it was some time ago, as the recent Freeview Playback Humax firmwares have replaced auto-padding with Accurate Recording.

So in this respect the Humax and Topfield behave the same - not really surprising as both now implement the Freeview Playback spec.

I'm amazed how you can say the toppy is noisy.

It doesn't have a fan !

A few rare units can have problems with their lids that need tuning, but this is very rare.

Our Topfield doesn't seem to have accurate bookmarking, but we are OK using Mystuff auto-padding. I don't think we are ever going to see eye-to-eye on this one. None of our mates think the Topfield is cool. No one has ever used it and said "Ooh, I must buy one of those". I'm left with the feeling that Topfield have designed it with the attitude "That'll do", and it meets the minimum requirements of a PVR, with nothing to make the experience easy. You might well think you've bought a PVR from Aldi. Yes, Mystuff addresses many of it's shortcomings, but it still remains sluggish and noisy. But why couldn't Topfield provide interface and features more like those available from Mystuff, instead of leaving it to third parties. Not everyone can download TAPs.

And *no-one* can download fixes for problems and short-comings with other machines unless and until the manufacter is good and ready.

Not entirely accurate......on the 9200T you have the option of using either Auto-padding, or Freeview Playback functions.

But Joe Public don't want to download TAPs to make it do what it should to do. When you buy a new car, do you change the engine and gearbox to make it do what it's supposed to do? No, you expect it to work properly straight out of the showroom. I'm quite happy with the way Humax and Digifusion work. Although Humax do keep listening to customers and updating software to suit. Some people seem to think it's a good thing that the Topfield can utilise TAPs, but all that does is make it so Topfield feel they can sell us inferior machines, with substandard softare and say "If you don't like it, you can always download third party TAPs". That's not good enough.

Yep, we'll all have to agree to differ with you. A huge majority of users are happy with their topfield, and find that it is indeed a 'ronseal' product. Best of luck finding a product that meets your exacting standards.

I wouldn't recommend anyone running the Topfield as it comes out of the box. Topfield have made things worse with the somewhat unreliable Freeview Playback firmware and uncharacteristically slow fixing of the problems. However, once running a reliable firmware and a TAP such as MyStuff it's unrivalled featurewise. I've yet to see another PVR that has a similar degree of community support and allows the level of customisation you can achieve with the Topfield. Name one other sub £300 PVR, currently in production (so Tivo not allowed), that can do automatic keyword searches. You argue that Topfield should address these sorts of issues, I'd agree, but until they do, we can use the TAPs and fixes supplied by the enthusiasts.

All this said, I'd hesitate to recommend it to anyone who wasn't capable of setting it up themselves, particularly if it's me providing technical support at the other end of the phone, so on my recommendation, my father has a Humax 9200. Certain things about it drive him nuts, but he's got to live with them because Humax completely control the software.

Only when it suits them, not when it suits their customers. You only have to look at their past record to see that they *do not* keep updating software and are still selling consumer boxes which have major and minor problems despite continued customer complaints over many years.

EnactOnline,

Opinions are like arse-holes... but I have to say I know 5 Toppy users and far from being happy with their boxes, I'd have to say they're all IN LOVE with them. Only "Mac Huggers" show more devotion to their hardware.

There is a reason there are loads of Toppy users sat waiting for a HD Topppy...

That said, I wouldn't recommend one to my 67 year old dad.