Any opinions on the Sharp DV-HR300?

rcflyers, Sounds Ok. Just as long as you don't have a problem with overheating.Personally the noise of the fan doesn't bother me as I have my Sharp in the living room. Anyway hope you get loads of fun from the recorder Cheers Silver

 

rcflyers, greetings
Be very careful about closing the ventilation in like that. Unless you live in a AC cold environment it might not be a good idea to cover it that way. One of the most important things that all electronic units need is plenty of ventilation. It may be better to simply move the unit into another room. Just my thoughts...
take care, kind regards, Manny

 

My DV-HR300 is suffering from teh same problem an contributor called "KevChan" posted about here some months ago. Whilst editing on the HDD, the unit froze up. I powered down after a few minutes, but it no longer starts up again. It gets to where the HDD and DVD lights flash, but continuous to flash them indefinitely. I've tried resetting, repowering etc but all to no avail.

I've arranged to get the unit sent back, and I'll try to find out what's gone wrong with it and update this thread with the results. Meanwhile I'm rapidly filling up my Sky+ box HDD with nowehere to burn the programmes to!


On a separate topic, has anyone noticed that Sharp seem to have discontinued our beloved beast and introduced a new range (in the UK at least): DV-HR400 and DV-HR480. See http://www.sharp.co.uk/products/range.asp?id=18.
However, a search of the internet for somewhere to buy these new machines comes up with nothing!

 

Talulah, Sorry to hear about your problem. I haven't had this one, as yet, but similar problems experienced by others seemed to be have been sorted out by powering off and resetting etc. Problems can also happen when burning on a PC and it can freeze for no apparent reason and in some respects the Sharp is a bit like a computer. Hopefully one of the Forum members can come to the rescue but it could just be an electronic or mechanical problem that needs sorting out by Sharp and beyond your capabilities at home.
I had a look at those new Sharp DVD/HDD recorders you mentioned in your post. They look good especially being able to dub from HDD to Disc at 48X. Don't know where the 48x media are coming from though, or am I missing something? Maybe our U.S. buddies have seen these models on sale Statesside. Normally in the UK we get newly released electronics second! Cheers

 

Hi Everybody the Sharp 400 and 480 are on sale mainland Europe. Pixmania are offering the 400 at 396 Euros and the 480 at 760 Euros. That means the UK price of the 400 should be around £270 and the 480 around £500.

 

Silver, the similarity of DVD recorders to PCs is something I was talking about to my workmate this morning! I am an embedded software engineer myself, working on utility meters - at the moment a prepayment electricity meter for the UK market.

Embedded software is quite different from computer software. It is much more closely tied to the hardware it runs on. In particular, whenever we access any of the hardware (e.g. displays, disks of any sort, even simple comms chips), we must always expect it to fail, and to take some sort of remedial action if it does fail, because with 2 million of our electricity meters on customers walls, if they ever hang up for any reason, performing a power-down-up cycle or reset is completely out of the question! My software is expected to run for 20 years with no insurmountable problems. How many Windows, or even Linux programs can say that!

Older hi-fi and video equipment such as TVs, CD players, etc, were more like embedded devices, and their software never crashed (they didn't have Reset buttons!). Newer stuff like our DVD recorder is probably based around a PC core running some sort of embedded OS, maybe Linux-derived. The problem with this is that the manufacturers recruit computer programmers who know about Linux and disk drives and things like that, rather than embedded programmers like me who know how to write software that runs for 20 years without crashing! The end result is that it is almost [bold]expected[/bold] that it will need resetting or powering down every so often. That is sacriledge in the embedded software world, but unfortunately these days is all to common in the computer software world. Placing a reset button on your equipment is as good as saying "my software isn't very reliable"!

Sorry, went on a bit of a rant there, but someone might be interested!

 

Wow Talulah!
I bow to your superior knowledge. Even an old hand like me understands what you are saying but if you can't sort it then I don't know who can. Going from VHS to the Sharp was a mega leap in quality but from the beginning I realised that it was a more complicated beast than my old Sony vhs and one had to be more patient and wait on it starting up etc etc. Maybe the new models will improve on the operation and be less quirky. When I bought my 300H 12 months ago it was at the time a bargain, pricewise. Since then it's been reduced in price even more. I haven't been unhappy and I get a lot of fun from it. Not just playing all region dvd's but transferring digital home movies to quality perfect dvd and recording movies from TV to disc etc. As I've stated before on this forum, newer formats & quality improvement to existing equipment will undoubtedly make my Sharp seem like Betamax in only a short period of time meantime I'm making the best of what I've got Cheers

 

Silver,
"Maybe the new models will improve on the operation and be less quirky".

I really hope so, but I doubt it very much. One problem with recent machines (particularly mobile phones but also stuff like our DVD recorders, and PC software) is that the manufacturers place high importance on getting the next model out the door as soon as possible, to "get their first", ahead of their competitors. While this may look great for the consumer, getting more and more functionality in short timespans, in fact it is the reverse, because there's no way that a device as complicated as our DV-HR300 can be developed into a reliable state in 6 or even 12 month timescales.

Luckily for us, the Sharp seems to be one of the more reliable DVD recorders. Before I bought the Sharp I looked at reviews of Philips devices, and purchasers were positively spitting!

I'm guessing my machine's fault was that I filled the HDD up almost completely, then tried editing a programme, which might well require more disk space. It seems there was nothing in the software that protected against this eventuality. Tut..tut..tut...

 

Hi Talulah, I did suffer the same never ended boot with HDD & DVD lights flashing as you for my Sharp a few months ago. I could neither find the cause nor any help. Since my Sharp is parallel imported from Singapore, there is no support in HK. At the end, I opened the case and removed the front, which is very tricky when the DVD drive is closed, to take out the disc. This could be very simple if Sharp had left a hole in the front like the one in standard DVD-Drive. I threw the DVD-RW disc away and not dare to use it again.

 

RE - TIMER & G CODE.

HI Manny and rest

My problems is this - I have mannualy set the timer each day to record 3 shows when Im at work. I started on Wednesday 22nd July - This was the date that I put into the timer and chose the daily option. I haver made sure that the timer was set on - and the machine itself was off when I left the house.

No matter how many times I resett this on the daily option the shows only recorded wednesday and thusday not friday ???

The date and time are set correctly. I Have also tried this with gcode setting as well and made sure timer was on power off etc....but still no luck.

Even though the inital date was last wednesday and its set to daily recording at the speciaifed times why isnt it doing this every day including sat and sun ????

Im very confused

Please help
Thanks so much in advance
Justin.

 

Hi Justin, if I'm not mistaken, I too had my unit set to record M-F. It also missed "Friday". But did record the following Fridays after that. I never figured it out. I had mine set for M-F for a period of 4 weeks. It did fine after that. The timer channel issue has been raised on this forum before. Unfortunately without a definite fix. Sadly this lil gem does have it's quirks. Perhaps one of our other forum members can offer more on this subject.
I would try setting the unit on a Friday however for your week long schedule and see if it starts up on that very same day.
Nice talking to you Justin.
Kind regards, Manny

 

Thanks Manny
Nice to meet u 2 !

so even through there is no m - f setting as such you eman try seting the daily setting on a friday and just letting it tape sat and sun as well ?

its such apain

 

1 more thing -

is there a firmware upgrade that I can download for the 300X model ?

 

Hey talulah,

On June 2nd, I reported the same problem as you did recently: the DVD recorder failed to start up properly - with the HDD and DVD leds blinking indefinitely.
I added in the same post that upgrading my firmware didn't solve it immediately. I afterwards also upgraded my HDD driver software. (All upgrade info was available in this forum thread, by the way...)

After that, I haven't had this booting problem anymore. I'm still not sure that these upgrades fixed the problem, but it's well worth the try...

Good luck,

D0rian

 

Cheers Dorian for that. I may try that when I get machine back from repair. At the moment I can't get the DVD tray open to upload new software of course!

 

Talulah
Don2blues posted this advice some time ago to a member who had a dvd stuck in the machine.Quote:-
"Try unplugging the machine, then plug it back in, then hit the dvd eject button first. This will turn on the machine and eject the drawer as soon as it's booted up. Works most of the time for me."

One question I would like to ask you. Was your hard drive almost full when you had the editing problems?
Cheers Silver

 

Good question Silver.

sydneyboi, I meant simply starting it on a Friday. But a 5 week schedule as you had intended it. Just to see if it reads that Friday and then every Friday after that.

Manny

 

Silver,

yes, I think the HDD was nearly full, and the programme I was editing was 7 hours long (I was deleting the last 4 hours!).

I would try the power-on -> DVD eject but the machine has been sent back now.

 

Talulah, Seems like you already stated in an earlier post that your Hard Drive was almost full when you had the editing problem. I am inclined to agree with you that the HDD needs a few megs spare to carry out editing etc but Sharp never mentions anything about this in the manual just simply telling us that the machine is capable of recording so many hours at SP, LP & EP etc! I think your 300 is now away to the menders? If you get a sensible answer from Sharp as to why the problem occurred , don't forget to let us all know, Silver

 

OOPS! Talulah, Seems my last post crossed yours in Cyberspace!