FUSION DIGIFUSION FVRT100 40GB HD REVIEW

The box itself is fairly small and attractive. It does make some noise, but I would not describe it as noisy. Most of the time it's not noticiable, but the noise may be a problem in a bedroom. Picture and sound quality are both excellent - noticably better than my previous Freeview box.

Recording quality is the same as the original broadcast in standard play mode. Compressed recordings are noticably worse, but I haven't seen the need to use compression except to see if it works.

So far I have never lost a recording or had the box freeze up. I know that some people have had these sorts of problems and belive they are either due to bugs in the orignal software, or due to low signal strength.

The machine's software has recently been upgraded (this happens automatically overnight, and the latest software version is usually transmitted once a week on a Saturday night). With the new software it is possible to start watching a recording before the programme has finished. The new software has also added a couple of other new features, enabled the option for recording subtitles, provided a 14 day programme guide and fixed some bugs.

I do have some niggles with the box which is why I did not give if 5 stars. The main ones are:

- The software reserves space on the hard disk when you add programmes to be recorded. This seems unnecessary and severely limits the number of recordings that you can programme in advance.

- Like everyone else I don't think much of the menu system - the background's horrible, and the navigation system could do with being simpler and faster. In particular, moving round the programme guide to set up recordings should be much slicker and faster than it is.

- A bigger hard disk would be nice - especially given the way it reserves space for future recordings. There is now a FVRT150 available with an 80Gb disk (only from Argos I believe) that's otherwise virtually identical to the 100 - I'd buy that one if I was getting one today. Having said that, I tend to watch things shortly after recording them so the disk size hasn't really been an issue.

- The remote control is not very responsive. You need to point it directly at the machine to get it to work, and some of the buttons are not where you'd expect them to be - for example the vol + and vol - buttons are not next to each other.

None of these issues are major in my opinion, but others clearly think they are! Also, I think there's a good chance that the issues with the menus will be sorted out in a future software upgrade.