SVR-HDT 500

[fred815]

I bought a HDD recorder SVR-HDT500 in april 2012 and almost immediately it started to create problems. Biggest mistake I have done so far with a SONY equipment. Main issues are: - you accelerate when watching a movie and it gets 'blocked' and jumps to a portion of the film too far away - you want to access the contents on the drive to watch a movie that was previously recorded and it says 'empty'...almost gives you a heart attack ! - you want to switch the unit off and for several minutes it goes on flashing... - you want to reset to factory setting when you get fed up and it flashes like a Xmas tree and never stops...problem still there by the way - you end up using the 'REPAIR DISK' function far too often. It fixes the issues temporarily and they come back eventually to bite you in the back - you do not want to switch the unit ON but you find out it goes ON and OFF and ON and OFF regularly throughout the day on its own...no kidding, unless we host a ghost at our place... And finally yesterday it displayed a message saying 'problem disk, please repair or format'...nice. Needless to say that the 'Repair' option never wanted to work....and I refuse to format my disk. What kind of proposal is that ? "Don't worry, erase everything and it will be just fine, like new"...so much for reliability. This stuff is a pile of c...excuse my language. You pay more for a SONY and they give you, shameless, a non functional, non reliable piece of jerk for an outrageous price compare to its competitors. The stuff is still under warranty (thanks God) but I am not even sure I want them to send me a repaired version anyway (if repairing means formatting the disk I can do it all by myself...thanks). Such a bad product from a SONY product line is a shame really. Am I the only unlucky one around here ?

[Anonymous]

Hello there

I have one of these units, and so has my mum. We have not experienced any of the problems that you are indicating. I would strongly recommend you going through the Sony Support procedures to get your unit repaired, as it appears faulty from what I understand. I believe the PVR has a 12 month warranty, so you might want to get cracking on that.

The only issues that I personally have experienced, is that it didnt like to be connected to my DH820 AV Receiver, but through the TV itself, and the IPTV functions on mine only outputs audio and no video (my mums work fine). I havent bothered to get it fixed as its not needed due to the fact that the TV works fine.

I hope that helps you in anyway.

Good Luck

[fred815]

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

It is reassuring that this seems not a manufacturer design issue on a global scale.

Still, I found a lot of unhappy people on internet blogs that are having identical issues so it seems you are among the lucky ones but not sure you are representative of the vast majority of consumers out there given all the bad press I am reading about it.

Cheers,

[Kags15]

Mine started to have problems just after I had thrown the letter to extend the warranty away. How I wish I had not done that. Mine has ended up saying the same as yours and customer services advised me to reset to factory settings. i did this but it then wouldn't go past the easy set up menu. It then cost me £28.50 for Sony to look at it and tell me it would cost £280 to fix!! As you can imagine I have declined the offer.