LG RHT599H 500GB HDD DVD Recorder with Freeview+

Received this today. Very well packaged, promptly delivered and a good price (£14 less than when I first checked it out a couple of weeks ago) - £190. Bought to replace our vintage LG VCR/DVD player which still works fine but is hopelessly out of date now, and a bit of a brick. Setup was very straightforward. We have Virginmedia so it was just a case of unplugging the old VCR and plugging this one in. It automatically searched for channels but once it had found the cable feed I stopped it looking further. Although it has Freeview+ built-in we won't be using it unless Virgin wacks the subs up too high! There are tons of bells and whistles so we started by just making sure we had it connected up correctly so as to see TV this evening with the recorder turned on and turned off (i.e. pass through). No problem. We then tried a brief recording just to learn how to do it and, again, it's very straightforward as long as you read through the relevant bit in the brief but sufficient manual. Frankly, once you've set up one recording it's pretty much second nature and logical. One pleasant surprise was the lack of tape noise (obviously!). 500Gb seems loads of space (compared to our old 3 hours max) but I'm sure we'll soon be filling it with all sorts of stuff. Next step will be burning to DVD. A very neat, trim piece of kit. If I can work out how to do it I will update this review as we try out all its capabilities over the next few weeks. update 6th April, 2013 Continuing to work well. Copying (dubbing) to DVD very simple and fast - as long as you remember to set it to the 'fast' option. I set my first DVD copy to SP (standard play) so it played the recording and dubbed it in real time. My second one took about 4 minutes for a recording of about 1hr 40mins. The timeslip feature is very good. Once you start recording, if you missed the beginning then, as long as the recording is at least 15 seconds into the programme then you can get it to play it from the beginning while it continues to record the rest of the programme. I used Amazon generic blank DVD+R disks. Formatting was straightforward, page 26 of the little manual, as was finalising. Both recorded DVDs run fine on the player and on my PC.

I bought two of these machines and they are absolutely brilliant. I just love them. They can record up to around two thousand hours at a low quality setting which is not visually great, but may be useful for low-cost security purposes. However if you set it correctly, it can record over 500 hours of high quality recordings. The programing could not be easier, just look up what you want to record in the program guide and press 'record'. When doing it this way, the machine sometime makes mistakes, so after setting a recording time from the guide, go into 'TIMERS' and highlight what you selected, the program title will be shown, then extend the start and finish times. When you do this, the program title will disappear but this does not matter as you can re-enter it after the recording is complete. Of course, you can enter what you want to record straight into 'TIMERS'. It is possible to cut/add/move edit anything which has been recorded and it can also burn to DVD anything you have recorded that you want to archive, therefore super-good for the home-movie buffs. If a retailer can supply me with more of these LG RHT599H 500GB HDD DVD Recorders with Freeview+ at the price I paid for the first two, contact me, I want two more.

I WAS A BIT DUBIOUS ABOUT BUYING THIS UNIT AFTER READING SEVERAL REVIEWS ABOUT IT. OK, I'V HAD IT ABOUT A MONTH AND TWO THINGS STAND OUT AS GRIM; THE WAITING TIME BEFORE ANYTHING HAPPENS AFTER PRESSING THE KEY PAD IS PAINFULLY SLOW, SEVERAL TIMES I THOUGHT THE UNIT HAD RETIRED FOR THE DAY. THE KEY PAD -- OH DEAR! OK FOR CHILDRENS FINGERS BUT VERY FRUSTRATING FOR A GROWN MALE. THE KEYS ARE TOO SMALL, MUCH TOO SMALL. HOWEVER, GOOD POINTS OUTWEIGH THE BAD; EASY HDD RECORDING AND PLAYBACK, AS IS DVD, FIRST TIME SETUP DOES ITSELF, HDMI TAKES SEVERAL MINUTES, PLENTY OF ONSCREEN INFORMATION, EXCELLENT SIZE HDD... AFTER READING REVIEWS OF A NUMBER OF OTHER RECORDERS AND THEIR DOWNFALLS, I'M GETTING USED TO THE TWO GRIM POINTS OF THE 599H AND CONSIDER THE UNIT A VERY GOOD BUY.

We were looking for a replacement dvd recorder for the mother in law for christmas. This was set up before xmas for her but the hdmi lead did not turn up straight away so we used a scart cable. The picture and reception was not all that good. This could have been a communal arial problem. But I knew that the scart leads arent that fast. When the hdmi lead came I put it in for her and took out the scart lead and it worked very well great picture quality. She soon was able to go to the quick and easy recording mode as she is 82 and she can record now and delete things and still play her dvd collection. She is very pleased.