Well I now have a very nice Full Hd tv, so I'm thinking that I really should upgrade my Satellite receiver to an HD one.

I'm looking at the Topfield 7710 HSCI and the Humax HDCI 2000, both retail for CHF300. Does anyone have any first hand opinions on either of these?

Nick
http://www.microspot.ch:80/microspot...710/detail.jsf

http://en.buchmann.ch/catalog/produc...oducts_id=7440

Try reading this:

http://www.satellites.co.uk/ebulletin/july08.html

Mentions the Humax is not so goodfor Fringe reception.

Good thread, I'm in exactly the same situation.

The guys at Highdefinition recommended this, I'd be interested to hear if anybody has any experience with it, specifically running cccam on it.

The Vantage looks good and I think they have a reliable reputation but it's a bit out of my price range, once you get up to CHF600 you can start looking at HD receivers with PVR's and time shifting stuff, as I already have a PVR I don't really need this option.
I was in a TV & HiFi shop the other day and they didn't have a good word to say about the Humax (any Humax come to that) which is why I would like some feedback from this thread.

I have an Humax HDCI2000, and i am very happy with it. I can't comment on the interesting HD picture quality side of it, because I haven't yet upgraded my TV....but:

a) reliable, crashes max about once a month, kept on standby, restart cures all.
b) Good user interface, clear and almost self explanatory
c) sound quality good.

It does everything I want it to, which is the best recommendation I can give to a piece of equipment....

dave

I'll be watching this carefully as one day I will move to HD satellite. Was thinking of waiting for the UK-FreeSat HD systems with PVR to come out (then wait a while for them to be less buggy).

I have a dreambox PVR which has replaced SKY, but I do miss the EPG.

For now I'm happy watching SD on my old CRT and Blu-Ray's etc.. for things I want with the FULL-HD experience in my cinema room.

Dave,
In sat receiver parlance is crashing once a month deemed reliable? OK if it's just a question of rebooting it then I suppose it's not a big problem.
Thanks for the info

They are mass-produced consumer devices, using the cheapest components known to man. They amplify extremely low level signals close to electrically noisy equipment. My Panasonic 31 used to crash every five hours. It was an overheating design fault, and even with my addition of a heatsink upgrade, it was complete ****e.

I am not familiar with any and industrial-strength video-phile equipment on the market, so we are stuck with it...

dave

Can you use these boxes to receive Sky with premium channels (movies and sports)? We're on our 2nd Sky HD box. The 1st one crashed every day or two, the 2nd one is much better behaved, but it does have a bad sector or something where the recording won't play.

No. Sky uses proprietary encryption.

dave

You can use them to receive premisum sky channels but using "other methods" rather than a Sky card.

Whilst this works out cheap (in the region of 15 Euro a month for every channel conceivable) your mileage may vary in terms of reliability.

just replace the drive. I just upgraded for a second time from 120Gb to 500Gb.

www.skycopyplus.co.uk brought all the contents over.

That's what I thought, but didn't know if it had changed.

I also have a Humax HDCI2000. In HD quality it is excellent and the sound via the optical output to my Amp is stunning. All normal channels look much sharper than the Sky box we also have. The HDMI output is also a good thing if you have a decent HD TV.

The only downsides I can see is having to upgrade the firware all the time. They also rarely list the most up to date versions on the Humax site, so you have to search for them on other Sat sites. The other annoying thing is that you have to do this upgrade via a null modem cable or something like that, which only my oldest PC seems to have a Com output to handle it (it is also not that easy so you need some IT skills to get it to work).

Also I notice it seems to get very hot when being used for a short period of time - so make sure it has good ventilation.

For the price, the picture and sound quality it is excellent though.

Gee, your definition of "reliable" is much different to mine.

I hope that in your work environment you strive for a less-than-once-a-month system crash...