A typical evening with the Topfield 5000
- Flick to Channel 9. Press record. That's ER taken care of.
- Flick to Channel 7. Press record. That's Lost.
- Press the list recorded files button. Spot Enterprise, and press the info key to read the tv guide description that was transmitted with the broadcast. Interesting plot, so press OK to watch it.
- Because you skipped all the ads in Enterprise, ER is still on when you finish. No matter, you watch ER from the start while it's still recording.
In Australia, the land that TiVo forgot, the Topfield 5000PVRt is universally regarded as the ultimate Personal Video Recorder.
However, you have to pay for quality. In this case, the RRP is over $1000, but if you search you should be able to find it for less than $900. Although this seems expensive, after having it for only a week I feel that it's great value to money. Compared to a $1000 high-end VCR from 5 or so years ago, it's in a completely different league.
One of the benefits of digital television is the electronic program guide. Program names and descriptions are transmitted with the programs themselves. Most channels only show what's on now and next, but some have guides for 4 days in advance (well done, Nine Perth). This is handy for browsing, to show you what you've flicked on, and also for recording. Apart from making it easy to schedule recordings, it also allows the recordings to be automatically labelled with the program names. This has the great side-effect of making it more enticing to watch recorded programs.
The Toppy is a hard disk recorder. It has no tapes and no discs, just an internal hard disk that can store about 60 hours. You don't have to worry about tapes wearing out, or recording over something you shouldn't, or forgetting where you recorded something. (If you really want to transfer to tape or disc, you can copy from the Toppy to a VCR, or upload to a PC or Mac via USB).
Skipping advertisements is much more pleasant than with a VCR. Pressing the ad skip button instantly moves forward 30 seconds - you don't see the picture that you're skipping at all. Press the button multiple times until you've bypassed all the ads.
An entirely new experience is provided by the Toppy's ability to pause live television. If the phone rings when you're in the middle of a show, just press pause, and the program will be buffered. When you return you can press pause again to continue where you left off. Then you'll see the rest of the show delayed by the time that you were absent.
Having two tuners has proven its worth already. Although you might not think that you'd ever need to record two channels at once, it's useful even just to cope with the regular occurence of channels running over time.
Picture in Picture is a feature which may initially seems gimmicky, but it can be useful. For example, if you want to watch a recording whilst waiting for a live show to start, you can have the live show in a little window as you watch the recording.
Packaging Quibbles
- The main description on the Topfield box is "Digital Terrestrial Receiver with CI and HDD". CI, or common interface, is used for descrambling encrypted signals, and is not a feature of the 5000PVRt, so despite its presence on the box and in the manual, you won't find it.
- A typo on the box doesn't inspire confidence - "MPGE-1 Layer 3 decoding", instead of MPEG-1.
- "Exciting games embedded" - if consumer electronics engineers become bored enough to incorporate some low-quality games into their products, games needing no more than a 15 second play to determine their lack of essential elements such as fun, then they should not be lauded on the packaging. On the 5000PVRt box, the exciting games are listed above such minor elements as "Time-shifting and dual-recording simultaneously", "Powerful trick mode", and "Dual decoding (PIP)". Instead, they should be hidden as an easter egg somewhere in the menus. Otherwise, they unforunately degrade the product as a whole.
The rear panel is scarily complicated, but has enough options that everyone should be catered for. The manual does not go into enough detail about the available sockets, so I had to go with good old-fashioned trial-and-error. After educating myself about SCART ports, I worked out a great system involving a SCART adaptor that allowed me to use my television with its single AV input port with my 5000PVRt, my PS2 and my VCR, all selectable from remote controls.
One major area that I haven't covered is the Topfield's expandibility. Its screen and remote control interface, and other features, can be customised by downloading programs via its USB port. It has an open API, and a thriving TAP community.
There are a few niggles with the product. If you pause live television to watch a program after a slight delay, then it's easy to miss the end of the program. If you switch channels, or if a scheduled recording starts, then the timeshifting is abruptly stopped, and the remainder of the program discarded.
Secondly, there is no reverse ad skip button. If you do 30 second ad skips past the restart of a program, then there's no easy way to go back a short distance to find the exact restart.
Thirdly, when displaying a widescreen picture on a normal television, in centre-extract mode, the picture is zoomed in too far. A 14:9 option with a small black bar at the top would be ideal.
Some of these problems can be ameliorated with TAPs, but it would be nice to see fixes for them make their way into firmware updates.
In conclusion, despite its apparently high price, it's worth every cent to revolutionise your television viewing experience. You'll end up watching more TV, but fewer ads.