Customer Reviews

Remanufactured HUMAX DRT800F DVD Recorder with TiVo

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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 on the 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.

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.

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!

The first unit I received froze every hour and I had to plug and unplug the machine to get it to work again. I called Humax tech support but I might as well have called my next door neighbor. Tech support staff were obviously reading from a protocol and consistently looked for ways to hang up on me and make me believe there was nothing wrong with the unit. When I told the first tech support person that I had already unplugged and plugged the unit several times he said "well just try it again and then call if it doesn't work and we'll see about replacing the unit." Needless to say it happened again and I had to call and eventually did get the unit replaced, but not after putting a $400 hold on my credit card (interesting considering the unit didn't even cost me that much to buy in the first place, and doubling the price of the box still wouldn't add up to this much). The second unit I received has worked well thus far and I've successfully burned shows to DVD as advertised. It's a great machine when it's working properly, but I'd say be wary of the quality of humax refurbished products and forget about getting good tech support.

I really enjoyed having the DVD burner. I burned all my favorite movies from TV to DVD. The Tivo part of the machine I can't live without. Unfortunately, after about a year the machine would crash every time I tried to burn a DVD. The only way I could fix it was to manually remove the DVD that was inserted in the burner and then unplug the machine and plug it back in. At first it would only crash occasionally, but eventually I risked the whole machine failing each time I tried to burn a DVD. I having nothing bad to say about Tivo, that works great and I can still watch DVDs. It is really the burner that makes this machine a flop. Personally, I would recommend getting your Tivo straight from Tivo. I've had my Tivo brand Tivo for three years now and never had a problem.

I have been using tivo for years , but the Humax Tivo Dvr has taken the product to another level, I love it because of the way it produces dvds with very little effort from tivo recordings. One problem it has is gettting hung up in a cycle of restartting over and over againg when a dvd is inserted that it cannot read, bummer!!!

this was frustrating, confusing, and it didnt work!! my dad had to call the company and order a new one , and all this stuff!! it was terrible, and worst of all, i never got to record my favorite TV show's new episode... :( I really couldnt even give this DVR with TiVo ONE star, it derserves ZERO!!

This Humax unit is a great TiVo product. I've owned two of these remanufactured units and have never had a single problem with them.

I've had my Tivo box for almost a year and it works great I get to watch all my favorite shows, and then record them onto a DVD. Obviously this is a TIVO box so you need to subscribe to TIVO service, so those of you whose Tivo doesnt work, you mightwant to subscribe to the service. I had a few problems with Tivo's rebate services/customer service, spoke to 20 different poeople, all claiming to be supervisors, but I did finally receive my rebate. (8 months later). Sucks thst it records 80 hours but only at lowest quality, but you can always transfer onto a DVD.
Overall, box works like a charm, does what it is supposed to, and a great deal w/rebate!!

Box works great. Recorder works great. Memory only holds 80 hours if it records on the lowest quality. At highest quality it only holds 25 hours or so, then it erases things form the memory.Also you can't watch live TV when it is recording unless you watch what it is recording. This can be a pain. Other than these things it is great. I definitely recommend it.

I own a REFURBISHED - HUMAX HRT800 DVD-R Series 2 TiVo and absolutely LOVE IT. It's worked like a charm since the moment I hooked it up. No problems with at all. This unit is a MUST for your home theater. It has all the inputs/outputs you need to connect it to a home theater receiver including an optical line out for TRUE digital sound. It's got Dolby Digital and DTS encoding too. Never again will I go back to a VCR - especially now that I can record shows to a DVD. And for the beginners out there - don't ever buy DVD+R's - you want DVD-R's - what's the difference? DVD+R's don't play in computers or component DVD players (DVD+Rs were a huge marketing mistake). Record programs to a DVD-R and it'll play in a Macintosh, a PC and vitually any consumer DVD player. I make copies of shows fro my brother who doesn't have cable and send them to him all the time.

Anyway, this unit REFURBISHED gets 5 stars. PLus, if you do happen to get a defective unit - HUMAX is really good about quickly sending you a replacement - despite some of the horror stories on here.

I bought the refurbished thinking it'd be just as good but wasn't. So much more difficult to use than I thought. Now I have my local cable provider's unit and it's a breeze!