Samsung DVD-SH871M

Samsung DVD-SH857M - 320Gb Hard Drive DVD Recorder.

Being my first ever Hard Drive / DVD purchase, and taking the shop assistants (appalling, as it turned out...) advice that 'they are all pretty much the same mate' advise, I bought the attractive looking Samsung and used it with increasing despair over 2 months. The more I used it the more frustrated and exasperated I became with its ridiculous limitations and appalling design. In the end I persuaded the store I bought it from to give me a credit note and I trotted of to the Panasonic shop and bought a EX89EB and within one afternoon of using that I now can REALLY SLATE the Samsung in comparison. To give you an idea how bad it is:

The display on the console is so weak, you can barely detect if the machine is on or off (unless you load a DVD then it sounds like a hair drier, so noisy!). The instruction manual is appalling, and its printed in a small font in light grey (ink saving??), its barely legible and its completely unhelpful and confusing. The Samsung remote control is long and thin, the buttons too small and close together, plus some functions next to each other make it inevitable you will SKIP not Fast forward meaning you have to restart your program. Things like that are just plain bad design and stupid. The on-screen software is archaic, like from 1970 - the software programmers must be using very very old systems for this. The TV guide is slow to load and clumsy to operate. Scrolling down it, one line at a time, you have to wait for the page to re-load. Its like comparing old fashioned TELETEXT with using the a Google page, its a joke. The first time I used a DVD, I could not believe how mechanical the sound is, you have to turn up the TV volume to overcome the whirring and fan noise - completely unacceptable (The Panasonic EX89EB is near-silent). When you record a TV show (and you are limited to only setting a max of 12 programs using the on screen menu), after the shows are recorded you the index on the hard drive only shows the time and date of the recording, so you have no idea which program is which - you have to rename MANUALLY each program using the remote control arrow buttons which takes ages and ages (The Panasonic EX89EB names your programs automatically.) The Panasonic on screen menu is superb, intuitive and intelligent ('smart' I would say) - I can't praise it enough.

Having used this Samsung for 2 months I don't think their is one redeeming feature. Yes its cheap, but by Christ its nasty. I will never buy a Samsung product in the remainder of my life, and I suggest you do the same. If this is representative of their range of products then they deserve to go out of business. I must thank Panasonic for retaining my sanity and faith in consumer electronics. I need a new camera, guess which one I will and won't be buying (GF1 or G1 Panasonic are superb cameras).

Anyone who recommends the Samsung either works for the company, has a lot of stock to sell-off, has no idea what they are talking about or must be clinically insane.

Samsung DVD-SH871M is an absolutely awful machine which is unusable. menu system so slow you can take 20 mins to select a channel.

Timer/autorecord so hit and miss that 99% of the time it doesn't record.

Simply don't buy one!