The Samsung's DVD-SH855M look is spoilt by the bright blue light on the power switch, which clashes with the device's green LCD screen. The fascia's lower panel hides a useful set of basic controls, as well as composite, phono, USB and FireWire inputs.
From its various inputs the DVD-SH855M can capture analogue or DV video either to its hard disk or to a recordable DVD at four different quality settings. The captured video looked good, especially from a DV tape source. You can also copy DivX, MP3 and JPEG files to and from USB sources such as a flash memory drive, DVD and the hard disk. We weren't very impressed with the scaling of JPEG images as the results looked pixellated, but DivX
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and MP3 playback was fine.
The DVD-SH855M has only a single hybrid tuner, so you can't record two programmes at once. If you want to watch one Freeview broadcast while recording another, you'll need a Freeview-compatible TV or a separate set-top box. The timeline EPG shows two hours of programming for four channels at a time. However, the video preview window changes channels as you browse the EPG, so you can't watch a programme while checking what's on later.
Timeshifting has to be activated manually before you can pause live TV. This is done with a little pop-up menu, although we can't see what's wrong with just using the pause button. You can't start timeshifting in the middle of a scheduled recording and, once it's recording, you can't access the EPG either.
The Samsung PVR has both component and HDMI outputs and can upscale television broadcasts, video and DVD to a resolution of 1080i. Letting the PVR upscale DVDs improved playback quality noticeably on our test TV.
Samsung's DVD-SH855M is incredibly flexible when it comes to capturing video, playing back data files and moving them from one storage format to another. Its EPG and timeshifting functions aren't very well designed, but it's still the best hard disk/DVD combo PVR in the group.
