Review This time last year, there was only one Freesat recorder available, from Humax. Now there are several, of which the Sagem DTR94500S HD is one of the latest.
Sagem's DTR94500S HD: the front panel doesn't exude quality
It’s a slim unit, around the size of three external hard drive enclosures put side to side – a size that’s partly achieved at the cost of having an external power supply. There's a USB port on the front, but it's unused.
Round the back there are two Scarts, HDMI, co-ax digital audio, analogue audio, component-video, Ethernet and satellite connectors. Inside is a 500GB hard drive.
Setup is simple and straightforward, assuming your dish is aligned. Enter your postcode, select output resolution, screen size and an optional PIN code, and that’s pretty much it – the tuning is completely automatic.
As with any two-tuner DVR, you need two feeds to make the most of it, but while some other boxes – notably the Humax Foxsat HDR – will work with just one feed, the Sagem doesn’t. It didn’t even realise during setup that one input was left unconnected, and simply reported failed recordings later. So, a dual LNB setup is mandatory here. There’s no Unicable support either. In fairness, this is still very rare, but it would nevertheless be good to see.
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