Sagemcom RTI90-320 Freeview+ HD recorder

Sagemcom may have adopted a smart new exterior look, but the box’s interior could do with a makeover. From the red and grey colour scheme to the uninspiring icons and ugly font, the user interface feels 10 years out of date. The LED display has a rather industrial feel to it too.

The unused Ethernet port awaits an upgrade at some point to awaken functionality

Worse than the offensive GUI is the tardiness with which the box responds to commands from the remote control. The handset itself is rather cramped, albeit sensibly laid out but you have to train yourself to think in slow motion when pressing buttons, particularly when scrolling through the channel list with the cursor, as you can easily end up choosing the wrong channel due to it sluggishness. Another aggravation is that to try and change any of the box’s settings you have to input the parental code - in slow-mo of course.

The EPG is decently laid out and more versatile than some. It opts for a mini window of the live broadcast with options to show one, two or four hours ahead in list or grid view, plus there’s day and date selection. The favourite channel setup wasn’t working on my box but I imagine Sagemcom will fix this with an OTA update soon.

Effectively laid out, but not the most responsive

The RTI90-500 T2 HD’s PVR functions are a little eclectic. The twin tuner, series-link, manual scheduling, live pause and a two hour buffer (one hour for HD) are standard but fast forwarding and rewinding is possible at 4x, 10x , 60x or a blistering 300x, whilst ironically, there’s no slow-mo option. Recording management includes manual creation of folders and the ability to merge two recordings into one, an odd one for which I can’t see much demand.