I've had this Topfield 5800 PVR since 2006, I've used it everyday since then and it has been a good piece of hardware. When I bought it Freeview PVRs were very rare and this was one of the better ones. I had a bad experience with a Pace Twin recorder that I suffered for a couple of years (now that was unreliable!)
It had a couple of firmware upgrades to get series link and recommendations, also to improve reliability as it crashed a little in the early days. I particularly liked the record two channels at once with playback of a third (if on the same multiplex as one of the recordings), also it had simple resume and skip functionality.
The user interface was a little clunky and dated but was functional. It did provide a USB interface for archiving, but at USB 1.0 speeds! Still it was a little project to get the tools working on Linux that could do this.
Sadly Topfield have not really kept pace with the market place, here is an interesting blog summarising the decline:
http://gonedigital.net/2010/12/30/how-topfield-lost-the-plot/
So I've switched to a Humax, having been impressed by the earlier model I bought my parents. I'll write up a review once I've used it for a while, but so far it feels a well executed piece of hardware - and gets ready for the switch to HD services.
Still thank you Topfield for the years of service.
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