LG - RHT397H - 160GB hard disc drive digital TV recorder and DVD recorder with 1080P up-scaling - Advanced time shift - pause and rewind live TV Best Buy

RHT397H review - 03 Jul 2008

16 out of 16 found this review helpful.

Already tried a Philips 5500 which went back for crashing twice in the first day!

This LG unit is in a different league, it does everything well and looks the part, everything is very logical and intuitive, you don't need the manual too much.

You can play DivX/XviD from DVD or copy to the HDD and play from there. Similarly USB directly or to local HDD but shame is the port doesn't provide enough power for my 2.5" SATA but it works fine with an external PSU. It supports FAT/FAT32 and does the long filename thing so you don't get stuck with 8.3 filenames. The DivX/XviD playback and your own recorded programmes seem separate such that you can be recording freeview and watch normal TV from the HDD but not something DivX/XviD.

Freeview tuner and 8 day EPG is brilliant, you can record a freeview programme to HDD and clip ads then dub faster than realtime to DVD. You can also copy home-made DVD's to the HDD, edit and dub back. It writes to -R, -RW, +R, +RW, -RAM, +R(DL) which seems to be the lot and can playback all these plus VCD and audio CDs as well as WMA files.

Nice touch when you go into menus the picture fades to black and menus fade in from black, the fonts used are also easy on the eye with no square edges and look great on screen. I haven't got an HD set so can't confirm how well the HDMI does. It can even provide 5V out on the aerial socket to power aerial amps.

Everything else functions as expected and the response is quick. Remote seems a little cheap but is compact and can operate the volume/channel, power and AV selector on a few TV manufacturers (fine with my Sony).

Can't find anything to criticise really, a great unit indeeed, very pleased with it.