Greg Greg's experiences with the Digitrex GKX-9000 DVD recorder
Last update: $Date: 2008/02/10 23:51:26 $

On 19 March 2004 I finally received the Digitrex GKX-9000 DVD recorder that I had bought on Ebay nearly two weeks earlier. It appears to be the same as the Apex DRX-9000, barely warmed over for Australian conditions (for example, the date format is the wrong way round). Note that the Australian site claims it will record on DVD-R and DVD-RW media. I don't believe this.

First, the summary: the unit I have received has set an all-time record for unreliability. Of 20 attempted recordings up to 11 April, 7 failed because of product defects (the system hung up), a 35% failure rate. When it does work, the programming sets all-time records for difficulty of use. This does not seem to be an isolated case: the Digitrex forum reports many similar incidents. Based on my experience with this unit, I would strongly recommend against purchasing one of these devices. I asked Digitrex for a statement about their reliability, but after four months, I find my expectations confirmed: they haven't replied to me.

The good news: it works, at least some of the time. Like many modern embedded designs, it looks hurried and rushed. The manual and the on-screen displays were obviously written by somebody who doesn't speak English very well:

5. In five minutes before it is ready to record the scheduled, it appears a Record Prompt dialog, affirm press OK, abolish press CANCEL, and if without operation for a moment it will record the scheduled automatically.
I'm curious about the background of that text; I'd suspect Eastern European.

Within a few minutes of installation, I managed to shoot myself in the foot: the player supports “progressive scan”, a new way to say “non-interlaced video”. I didn't know if my TV supported progressive scan, so I tried it. It didn't. Then, of course, I couldn't access the on-screen display, and the non-intuitive method of access (hint: in case of doubt, try Select and look for the tiny error message at the right of the screen) made it impossible to get a display again. It took a while to find the button I/P on the remote control, which toggles between interlaced and non-interlaced video.

Things weren't exactly plain sailing after that. I'm still trying to work out what's going on, but by the end of the evening, I had established:

  1. It's rather obtrusive. It has a loud fan, and the power LED is bright blue, about 2cm wide and 5 mm high. I've covered it over.
  2. It's very slow. Functions like channel change have a noticeable delay, and some functions (stop recording, power down) seem to require accessing the DVD+RW: the latter takes about 30 seconds. The on-screen text suggests that it's writing to the DVD+RW, even when no write access seems necessary. It doesn't seem to do any harm, tough.
  3. Interrupting it while it is recording is a Bad Idea. I managed to make a coaster out of a DVD+R like that.
  4. I also managed to hang a recording on a DVD+RW, and the only way to get any reaction was to power cycle it. This was the first of many hangs; see below.
  5. Power cycling makes it forget the date and time.
  6. The user interface is very confusing. To change anything, you need to press Select. Do that at the wrong time and you'll erase what was there before (this applies particularly to things like recording dates and times).

Other observations

I've been looking round on the Digitrex forum and discovered some interesting gotchas and issues:

The show-stopper: continuous hangs

There are a number of irritations about this device, but by far the worst could be summed up as: “It doesn't work”. Between 19 March and 10 April 2004, just over three weeks, the system hung six times during recording and did not respond to any input. The partial recording was lost. The only way to recover is to power cycle, which coincidentally causes it to forget the time. This is clearly broken.

It's not clear whether this is a software (design) problem or a hardware (quality control) problem. On 10 April 2004 I sent a report to Digitrex via their contact page, asking them: 

This device appears to suffer from a design fault which causes it to hang up at random
during recordings.  Please contact me by 16 April to inform me whether you will repair or
replace it.

Maybe I'm cynical, but I don't really expect to hear anything back from them. If I do, I shall report it here.

This is really quite a problem. Yes, I could probably send it back and get a refund, but then I either need a new DVD recorder (typically costing twice as much), or I end up sitting on 100 DVD+R and DVD+RW disks. Both are not very satisfactory.

History of hangs

Up to 11 April, we have managed 13 successful recordings on the unit and 7 failures, a spectacular 65% success rate.

Getting service

On Tuesday, 13 April I called the Digitrex customer support line. They don't seem to have their own customer support: the phone menu system announced itself as something like “Australian Warranty Support”. They take my prize for the most irritating hold “music”: radio commercials (which indicated that they're in Sydney) interrupted every minute by a loud beep and the information that I was still in the waiting queue. Finally spoke with Robert, who gave me the address of a local repair place, and also the information that there appeared to have been a lot of problems with hangs in the USA, but not too many here, and that it's probably hardware, either overheating (shouldn't be the case here) or defective components.

Now the problem: what do I do while it's being repaired? Wrote to Auctionbrokers, who sold me the unit, and asked them to replace it. We'll see what happens.

How to use the recorder: Greg's simplified instructions

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