Channels are stored in a main list from which they can be separated into four favourites marked A to D. If you're banking on being able to get more than Astra 2 and Eurobird you may be disappointed to learn that the doesn't match up to the likes of the Humax Foxsat HD-R when it comes to dealing with channels not on the Freesat EPG or found on other satellites. There's no DiSEqC switching or motorisation and no pre-stored satellite or transponder data, so it pays to know the precise details of what you're looking for.
Frequency and symbol rate and channel type DVB-S or S2 must all be entered into a non-Freesat channels menu before scanning. Located channels can be added to the main list or 'favourited'. Non-Freesat channels do not get an EPG. The EPG and Sagem's distinctive icon-led menus retain the DSI86's grey-with-amber highlights colour scheme, which is still a little garish to our eyes. It's also odd, considering that Freesat has a habit of insisting that manufacturer's products adopt a more uniformly black appearance.
You can view a programme grid of data allowing for eight channels onscreen at a time with information displayed in two-hourly segments. This can be sub-divided into bespoke EPGs for specific channel genres such as news and entertainment. You can skip day by day or back and forth in two-hourly chunks. A vertical red bar shows you where you currently are in the schedule. Synopses are shown at the top of the guide, together with a progress bar.
Pressing OK starts a recording and you're prompted as to whether you want to record one episode or the entire series. The 's two tuners allow you to record two standard or high-definition programmes at once while playing back a recording from the hard drive.
A one-hour recording occupies 1GB of space when in standard definition, or 1. As well as recording from the guide, you can record by hitting record or there's an eight-event timer with once, daily, weekly and weekday only repeat options. You can also record while in standby. Recordings are stored in the library labelled by name, day and date where they can be re-named, PIN-locked and organised into user-created folders. When browsing the recordings list, you can have the selected programme running in a small window on the right of the screen.
Timeshifting or 'deferred TV' as it's called here, is possible including while recording another channel and the receiver automatically keeps a running cache of what you watch, which can last up to two hours.
You can fast-forward and rewind timeshifted material recordings at speeds of up to x indicated by onscreen arrows and a small progress bar appears in the top left of the screen. Other useful features? We like the adjustable timer margin — you can choose to automatically add five, 10 or 15 minutes to the start and ending of any recording, just to be sure you capture the whole show. Excellent HD performance Performance is fine, and picture quality with BBC HD is obviously the main event: colours are vibrant, dark areas of screen are dense and consistent and, while there's a shimmer of noise on some fast motion, it's not problematic.
True, the Humax Foxsat-HDR has the quality edge, but it costs more: relative to its rivals, the Sagem's up to scratch with HD, and its standard-definition images appear consistently good too. This is, however, another PVR to fall foul of our scaler grumbles: there's no 'auto-bypass' mode, so if you set it to i to view native i HD, you're forced to use the Sagem's upscaling for standard-definition, too.
Any other issues? The DTRS's menu and guide buttons on the remote control are way too small: in fact, the whole remote handset comes over as a cast-off from a cheap DVD player, rather than something intuitive you'd want to live with on a daily basis. But that's about the size of our muttering. The Sagem has to drop a star because, thanks to its new-found iPlayer support, the Humax Foxsat-HDR's improved value and its already-intact performance advantage means the DTRS is no longer so appealing — but it remains a decent-enough buy.
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