Philips DVDR5520H review

Performance
Let's get one thing straight at the outset. Despite the ludicrous claims the box makes about turning Freeview into 1080p HD, the DVDR5520H really doesn't achieve such miracles. Sure, it outputs a 1080p signal, but it's not suddenly increasing the amount of data that goes into a Freeview picture. Indeed, we think you'd be hard-pressed to spot any difference between this machine and one that doesn't upscale. This is because HD TVs all have built-in scalers, and they're generally very good.

Stupid marketing-speak out of the way, you'll find that the picture quality from the Philips is pretty good. While it didn't suddenly look like HD, when connected via HDMI we had no major complaints about the picture at all. The menu system was rather rough around the edges, but it works in a fairly logical way.

To test the DVDR5520's performance, we set a number of timers to record some daytime televisual delights. We found the whole process very simple indeed. The Philips machine warned us if we set a timer that clashed with another recording, but it didn't refuse to record it -- it left it up to us to choose which one of the two clashing programmes to record and which to cancel.

The picture and sound quality were both decent enough. It's worth pointing out that the DVDR5520 ships in a state designed to optimise the recording time, not the picture quality. We'd suggest it's worth changing the record quality at once via the picture menu. Other than that, watching live and recorded Freeview looked good when sent to our TV over HDMI. We didn't think it offered much enhancement over the TV's built-in tuner, but then this product is primarily designed to compliment your TV's tuner, not replace it.

DVD playback was also very pleasing. We popped in one of our re-mastered Bond DVDs and were impressed by the quality, with plenty of detail and good, natural colours and motion. We're sure this will appeal if you're looking to get an upscaling DVD player to make the most out of your existing movies, instead of spending a boat-load of cash on a Blu-ray player.

A slight disappointment with the DVDR5520 was its slow menu performance. Going into the list of programmes you've recorded takes a few seconds while the machine gets its act together. This is bearable for the most part, but if you press a button by mistake while you're watching a show, you'll regret it, because it will take a while to get back to what you were watching.

Conclusion
Overall, we rather like the Philips DVDR5520H. It's a competent machine, which has an awful lot of very useful features and it seems to be priced sensibly. It's not always the most usable device though, and we'd suggest that you'll get better picture quality with one of Panasonic's PVRs.

Edited by Jon Squire