Dabs.com are selling these as below is this a good deal?

im looking for a pvr and am a loyal sony customer....

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx...avigationKey=0

Jh

Unfortunately these aren't actually made by Sony, they are just badged Digifusion boxes.

As these are 'graded stock', they are almost certainly boxes which were faulty under warranty, and were returned for credit. Presumably they have been repaired, and sent back out at a lower price - however, I notice they specify only 3 months guarantee?, graded stock should have a full 12 months guarantee.

There are actually two different versions of this box, the early ones had severe problems with being noisey, and an over the air upgrade actually broke the boxes all together - requiring a manual return to the original software.

Presumably these boxes will be the first generation ones?, but will have had the software upgraded manually - which provides a permanent upgrade, where you can't revert to the earlier version.

The price though isn't really very good, you can get similar boxes (identical boxes?) for a similar or lower price, that aren't second hand.

As stated above the price is not great, I got mine about 3 weeks ago for £82 all in off ebay with 12 months warranty but to be honest I wish I hadn't bothered. The box is slow to respond to requests and it is loud when on standby (which doesn't bother me) but the worst thing is the way you have to change channels. You either have to go through the epg which switches off the current channel and it displays by channel so you can only see one channel at a time, you need to scroll left or right to scroll through other channels. You can also use the prog up/down buttons or type the number in directly (which doesn't always work if you're typing in two digits due to the slow response). But what it lacks is the ability to see now and next info in a box at the bottom of the screen while watching a channel and being able to scroll through whats on other channels before switching over - as you would on a sky or ntl box. This might not matter to you however but to me it is a real pain, you also can't see at the touch of a button when the current program finishes and what its called without going to the epg which switches off the channel you are watching.

Mine also crashes often, its being returned to the shop for a replacement but apparently this is not common.

The digifusion fvrt200 (from memory) is the same box, this one is just rebranded as a Sony with different sw. It also has the feature mentioned above i believe and is cheaper. It doesn't look as good IMHO but I will probably replace my Sony with one of those pretty soon (I might try loading the digifusion sw on to the sony first though).

Having said all that from what I have seen you would be hard pushed to get a box with similar features for this sort of money.

If it's noisey on standby then it's not had the software upgraded, so it's a version 1 box, and it's not been 'refurbished' (or even repaired) as it should have been.

The original version 1 boxes software left the fan on ALL the time, even in standby, the fixed version only turns it on when required, and always off in standby.

I don't know if the OTA update if going to be sent out again, there should be no reason for it to be?.

Possibly, but I've got sw version 1.5.8 on there which I believe is the latest. The fan does go off eventually, when I put it in standby at night it stays on but by the morning it has gone off. Does yours have the on screen guide?

Yes, 1.5.8 is the latest version for the version 1 boxes, the version 2 boxes have the same software with a completely different number, and have never had an upgrade.

Mines got a duff tuner, which is why I got it free
But I don't ever use it, as I have Sky+ and a Humax 8000.