Remanufactured HUMAX DRT800F DVD Recorder with TiVo
Would be great if they actually worked for more then a month!
I knew I was taking a chance when I ordered one that was refurbished but I could actually afford this one and what was wrong with it should have been fixed.  The first one and the 2 that have since replaced it all initially worked but broke within a month.  The first one had the DVD drive go bad the other 2 have had what appear to be hard drive problems.  The last replacement unit lasted 2 weeks before it wouldn't copy an episode on to DVD.  Prior to that it had frozen up 4 times, the first time being the day after I set up the unit, and the playback of the episodes was getting worse and worse. <br /> <br />Every time I have had to deal with customer service they have made me go through a number of things before replacing the unit.  Do not bother to call them at all until you have unpluged the unit including the phone line for 3 minutes and allowed the unit to reset because they won't do anything until you have done this.  Also if you are using any DVDs that are not TDK or Sony they will blame the problem on the disks no matter what the problem is or how reliable the DVDs have been for you.  They will claim that the machine is very sensitive and if you put any other disks in the drive it must be unplugged and reset.  I am not sure how you are supposed to make sure that any pre-recorded DVDs you watch meet their specifications.  It should be noted the only thing the manual says is that you need to use DVD-Rs.  <br />  <br />  Today between the 5 phone calls I had to make to customer service, the two trips I had to make to the store to buy products that they told me would make the machine work properly and the large number of tests they had me run using the products they told me I had to buy I wasted 5+ hours (yes that was hours!) trying to convice them that it was a problem with the machine before they would finally admit that the machine shouldn't be doing what it was doing and agreed to send me a replacement. It would have been funny when the guy who had stayed onthe phone with me while I was doing one of the tests said \\"It really shouldn't do that\\" if I hadn't been so frustrated by that time. <br /> <br /> At one point I had a truly unbelieveable customer service person who told me that there was a slim to none chance that the machine would ever break.  Considering they are both selling refurbished units and replacing broken units with refurbished units I was a bit surprised by this.  After 20 minutes on the phone with her she told me that the bad playback of the Tivo portion was because I didn't have a cable box (despite the fact that I have had another Tivo for 6 years and never experienced this problem before) she totally ignored the fact that it was freezing up on me and claimed that the copy problem was due to the DVDs I was using despite the fact that one of the DVDs I had used was the one that came with the unit.   <br /> <br /> To make an even longer story short when this unit works it is wonderful but don't expect that it will work for very long and be prepared to spend a lot of time (literally hours) with customer service when it breaks!