Philips DTR220

Being around the £30 mark, we weren”t expecting anything exciting when unboxing the Philips DTR220. That’’s why we were particularly impressed to see that Philips has managed to produced an excellent set top box, at least in terms of appearance, at a budget price. The unit is very small, stylish and sturdy.

As is becoming the norm, setup was quite simple with only a couple of SCART jacks and of course the aerial. We clocked the auto tuning process in at around 4 minutes which is quite acceptable, but more importantly the unit picked up every channel it had to offer through the Freeview network.

The software side was well thought out, with a splash screen appearing when the unit is turned on (as opposed to a blank screen from other units while they power up) and a nice, animated icon on display for the radio channels. We noticed that on occasion, the on screen display would become garbled and unusable. This made navigation through menus impossible and required a reset of the unit.

Overall the unit is very impressive in terms of aesthetics, and has average to above average performance in general use. We were concerned with the display corruption which would occur infrequently - perhaps once or twice a day. For this we give the Philips DTR220 a four star rating.