Humax PVR-9200T "refresh":Updated Model 2008?

[Ascari]

In related news, the firm also revealed that it's planning an update of its popular PVR-9200T hard disk recorder (pictured), but again remained tight-lipped on specifics; the smart Freeview-recording box already includes a 160GB hard drive and bags of Sky+ style features - but could a larger 250GB or 400GB hard drive be in the offing?

http://gadgetshow.five.tv/jsp/5gsmai...lnk=101&id=658

The company has also confirmed to Pocket-lint that is planning an update of its popular PVR-9200T Personal Video Recorder model in the new year.

In a candid chat with spokespeople for the company this week, Humax acknowledged that the current iteration of its flagship PVR was in need of a "refresh".

http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news/ne...h-hd-box.phtml

[marcdavis]

The company has also confirmed to Pocket-lint that is planning an update of its popular PVR-9200T Personal Video Recorder model in the new year.

Yep. Its been planned for mid January, but I can't remember the actual date (it was specified on hummy.org.uk by Humax).

[ash005]

afaik its between the 14th and 16th of jan 2008


ash .

[Searcher2]

"Could a larger hard drive be in the offing?". I may be missing something but one has been on sale for quite some time....

http://www.humaxdirect.co.uk/product...=10055&cat=stb

"remained tight-lipped on specifics"... what? The Gadget Show showed the Series link feature on their TV program last month on a Humax passing it off as a current model - when in fact it wasn't released. I think they put out an apology some time afterwards.

[bradavon78]

No doubt HDMI Upscaling will be on offer but otherwise who knows.

[PhilipL]

Hi

No doubt HDMI Upscaling will be on offer but otherwise who knows.

Upscaling Freeview is all a bit pointless. The quality is so bad to start with you would need God in the box to do any decent upscaling. As all LCD/Plasma HD TV's already container an upscaler, I strongly suspect that most/all TVs are doing as good or better a job than anything Humax could conjure up.

Regards

Phil

[bradavon78]

I never said it was worth it just likely

As to your point personally I'd prefer the choice so I could see if my TV or the Humax/Whatever does a better job of upscaling.

[PhilipL]

Hi

I recorded Doctor Who last night from Freeview on the computer, so this is the digital MPEG stream saved to the hard-drive. I then authored that to DVD, there was no re-encoding involved, so what I had on DVD was the identical Freeview transmission, but it could now be played on an upscaling DVD Player via HDMI to the TV to compare directly to playback quality of the same recording from the Humax.

As I have always found, upscaling on the DVD Player produces a subtle reduction in picture quality, especially at 1080, which is to be expected as the picture then goes through 2 big scaling changes, upto 1080 then down to 720.

Comparing the two directly, even though the Humax puts the signal through a digital to analogue conversion to push the video by RGB Scart, the differences were very little. If you walked into the room and didn't know the source, it was guess work to try and work out if you were watching the all digital HDMI connection or the Humax. Doing an A/B switch the HDMI connection slightly had the edge in terms of sharpness, very very slightly, which actually made the compression artefacts from Freeview stand out more. You could of course ask the DVD player to reduce these artefacts and it would be better, but then you loose the slight extra sharpness.

HDMI on standard definition is simply a big marketing trick. An HDMI output on the Humax will not give you anything better than what is already possible, and the slight extra sharpness you may gain just means the poor quality Freeview's over compressed picture is ever more noticeable.

Yes you might find Humax go mad and put a really expensive upscaler into an HDMI model (although unlikely) and this may be a tad better than your TV. However if your TV is that bad at scaling, it simply means when you upscale at the source, any improvement is undone because the TV always applies some form of scaling, either up or down, you can't turn this off. So having two lots of scaling/processing, one by the TV still which isn't very good, basically can still mean what you see is a worse picture, although quite likely because you think it should be better, it might even look like an improvement, and this is the reason why HDMI on standard definition have been a nice little revenue generator for the various companies

Regards

Phil

[The Wagster]

Will it be possible to connect the Humax to the tv via HDMI and not have any upscaling from the Humax? Presumably that would give a better picture to the tv than with the current generation rgb scart. The tv would then have a better quality picture to scale to it's native resolution. That's what I'm holding out for from the next gen Humax or Toppy.

[PhilipL]

Hi

All equipment with HDMI as far as I'm aware allows outputting the picture without upscaling.

However the difference even then between RGB SCART and HDMI will be slight, unless your TV does a bad job of accepting RGB inputs, you probably will not notice much difference.

Regards

Phil

[bradavon78]

Originally Posted by The Wagster

Will it be possible to connect the Humax to the tv via HDMI and not have any upscaling from the Humax?

It's just speculation the new model will even have HDMI. All HDMI DVD Players allow you to choose the output resolution so in theory if it has HDMI then yes you'll be able to do that.

Originally Posted by The Wagster

Presumably that would give a better picture to the tv than with the current generation rgb scart. The tv would then have a better quality picture to scale to it's native resolution.

It depends if your TV has a better scaler than the Humax scaler. For instance many DVD Players have better upscalers than what people have in their TVs.

If the Player has a better scaler let it upscale then the TV doesn't have to. It's worth testing both.

Originally Posted by PhilipL

However the difference even then between RGB SCART and HDMI will be slight, unless your TV does a bad job of accepting RGB inputs, you probably will not notice much difference.

On DVDs I do. It's not huge but is definitely. I'd imagine Freeview will be the same but it's hard to tell when Freeview is much lower quality.

[nwhitfield]

The problem is that, very often, you can't turn off scaling in the TV anyway. Some sets have an option - 1:1 pixel mapping is the technical term. But cheaper ones probably won't. And it's the scalers in the cheapers ones that are likely to be problematic; they may even make a worse mess when faced with something that's been scaled once already.

So, if you output a 720p picture from a PVR or DVD player, the TV will scale it again to 768, for the actual resolution of the display, when many users might actually prefer a small border at each side. Typical mid-low end LCDs are 1366 x 768 or thereabouts; 720p is nominally 1280 x 720.

Even with a panel that has a 'standard' HD resolution, there may be scaling, depending on how the set is configured to deal with overscan.

Anyone up on the various terms manufacturers use to describe 1:1 pixel mapping in their menus? It might help people to know if their sets can be tweaked that way.

[laney456]

Well I have a decent 32" Samsung LCD wth upscalling and built in freeview.

I used to own the Humax box and when I connected it to the TV through scart RGB I wasn't impressed at all...the picture looked naff.
I went out and also bought a QED gold scart and it made hardly any difference....everything was set to RGB, I also played around with the picture settings and still I wasn't happy having gone out and spent £600 on a TV that looked worse than my CRT.

I then sold the Humax and bought the Samsung SH855 with freeview that outputs via HDMI and the difference in picture was amazing.
I now view freeview in 1080p...and it looks great....but it is well documented on here the bugs with the SH855.

I loved the functionality of the Humax, but not the picture, and if they released one with HDMI....I would be first in the que to get one!

[nwhitfield]

The new Topfield will upscale to 1080i, and there's also an interesting looking menu option to increase or reduce picture size by +/- 20%; I shall have to play with that and see what effect it has, when I get my hands on one.

[bradavon78]

PVRs show a direct Freeview stream DVD Recorders alter the stream to DVD MPEG2 format (and sometimes S-Video too) it could be this you prefer instead of HDMI.