Astratec TOPD3 Freeview digital box |  | Manufacturer: Astratec
Buy New: £24.99
as of 9/9/2010 02:08 EDT details
New (3) Used (1) from £20.00
Seller: Appliance Care Limited
Rating:  8 reviews
EAN: 5060083062086
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
 freeview box July 24, 2010
Mr. Robert Jones
great box easy to set up 2 scarts make it better for using dvd with tv
Astratec topD3 it works February 17, 2010
alan (UK)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
its a slim line box,easy to get up and running, just plug the scart in then power. switch on press ok on the remote control,it takes 1 or 2 mins and your up and running simple as that. there is no stammer or freezing of picture,picture quality is good, better than most.for me this digi box has been a very good buy.
 Mine Simply Didn't Work! February 10, 2010
David I. Hundeyin (Hull, UK)
3 out of 8 found this review helpful
I know it's cheap and all that, but...what, pray tell, is the point of a freeview box WHICH DOES NOT WORK? Plugged mine in, as per the instructions, scanned for channels...and it found none. Adjusted my aerial to the point of irritation...still nothing. I have to content myself with the few channels I can get with my aerial alone. This was a waste of £20.
 Not terribly impressed; with this box and with the Freeview standard. November 10, 2009
Zack Pliskin (Hampshire, England)
18 out of 19 found this review helpful
PROS
* Easy setup, just press a button and wait a few minutes for it to auto-tune.
* Sleek, simple design. A lot less ugly than most cheap boxes.
* Excellent standard definition picture quality (depending on channel provider of course) via SCART in RGB mode.
CONS
* The EPG is so slow... you can hit the guide button and sometimes it'll take half a minute or more to load what's on the first handful of channels for the next few hours. Even switching between channels it won't load NOW straight away, but loads NEXT, so you'll be seeing "No information available" quite a lot.
* Crashes/freezes regularly - for me, about once or twice a week. By this I mean the remote stops working while it's on, or becomes intermittant. Or perhaps it won't turn on at all, requiring you to unplug and leave for a little while before plugging in and using again. Is more likely to do this if it's been left on for over half a dozen hours. Fortunately you don't have to retune each time, well not yet anyway.
* No front-mounted buttons, so if the remote is lost or breaks the thing is useless.
* Not the best/most logical remote layout in the world.
This isn't a brilliant Freeview box to be honest: there are better boxes even in this low price point range. I'm not terribly bothered because I don't watch a lot of broadcast television - adverts drive me mad - but you can do better.
What's most worrying of all is that a lot of the channels are low bandwidth compared to others, meaning that on fast-moving scenes the picture becomes blocky (ITV) or appears to have small vertical streaks along it (E4) and therefore looks worse than the equivalent analogue version would. The whole point of the digital switchover was to improve quality and expand the range of channels, but all this has led to is less content spread about a greater number of channels with disappointing picture quality. If everyone had simply waited until proprietary H.264/AAC decoding hardware like that in Blu-Ray players had become more affordable we could have stunning picture quality and even more channels, because at the same bandwidth as the current MPEG-2 streams used in Freeview the H.264 standard would look far superior. As it is, only the BBC channels look acceptable and even they lose some clarity on fast-motion sports like F1. Watching football on ITV is painful!
Freeview box - cheap! September 1, 2009
Mr. J. P. Deal (West London)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
For the price I cant knock it - plugged in and scanned the channels and we were away - really reliable and easy menus with little or no instructions needed. Only thing I would say about the box is that the EPG sometimes takes a while to up date itself but that may be down to me using it on an indoor antenna in West London.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
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