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Hi Colin,
Re. the older Humax’s, I think they were just designed and built better. Also expectations weren’t as great, hard-drives smaller and more reliable, often with a 3 or 5 year guarantee, 80GB on the 8000T and 160GB (I think, although I swapped it almost immediately for a larger) on a 9200.
I’m not personally aware of the psu issue, only what I’ve read. I’ve experience of swapping out capacitors on other power supplies though, it’s more common than you’d imagine, manufacturers in the supply chain cutting costs, we’ve seen it with batteries, sanyo and sony with their li-ion, more recently Honda with airbags etc. etc. the list goes on and on and on.
Humax will guarantee their own badged products for 2 years, in the States 90 days is common, in Europe up to 6 years depending upon price paid. One of the links linked to an upgraded dtr-t1000 with better capacitors, better hdmi etc. etc. all in for £599, I’d expect 6 years warranty for that, minimum 2 years on a MRP £249 consumer product is about right, although we’d all expect it to last longer.
We can see why Humax has moved to external psu’s. No manufacturer will shoot themselves in the foot and openly admit problems. Quite often it’ll be a supplier further down the line supplying a substandard component that may not become apparent for months/years.
Topfield, digihome, vestel (incl. all those brands you want to forget) and Thomson/Sky etc. etc. have had more than their fair share of psu capacitor problems.
If it’s got a BT badge on it then BT got these at a reduced price and made themselves responsible. BT badged boxes are normally cheaper and this is the price you pay for the bargain.
I’m not aware of a tutorial, only the links for mainly foxsat hdr capacitors, de-solder, remove and solder in the new ones making sure +/- right way round. Last psu I did was on a shuttle cube pc, luckily had over-specced capacitors to hand. Alternatively psu can be sent off for repair, assuming of course that it is the psu.
As far as software goes, all boxes have problems, those that don’t have problems get outdated quickly, those that update fight an almost losing battle keeping up with the changes forced upon them. I have a TT throw-away huawei box with external psu, takes 5 mins to boot up, I’ve never used it productively as my humax’s are so much easier.
Add in youview/freetime layers and the software soon becomes a quagmire and it’s impossible at times for consumers to tell the difference between software and hardware problems.
If it were my dtr-1000, I’d have the psu out, see if there’s a matching capacitor kit or if I weren’t handy, send it off for repair. I’m also a bit fanatical about location, placement and air-flow and I’m not surprised at this time of year where it gets quite cold outside, central heating goes on and bakes boxes. I’ve been in some living rooms and it’s like walking through treacle, it’s a wonder anything survives the heat.
ColinK – 8 hours ago »
Humax reply when I asked about the well known PSU issue.
Humax does not fit faulty PSU’s, all Humax boxes are fully tested and working to specification being shipped. If the box was obtained from BT they would need to repair the box.
This reply came despite knowing I did not buy directly from BT and unit was over 1 year old.
They similarly screwed me around with my 9200 claiming zero firmware issues, before abandoning 9200 customers.
There is no “well-known capacitor issue”.
YouView triallists, of whom I was one, were each given a DTR-T1000 which after the trial they were allowed to keep. These free boxes were granted a one-year Humax warranty. In my view, this was a sensible if slightly cynical move by YouView, as it gave them a very cheap on-going supply of unofficial beta-testers during the first year following the ham-fisted soft launch. Near-monthly updates were released during that first year, as the YouView tech team struggled to get the many, many bugs ironed out. Some of these releases, unsurprisingly, made things worse rather than better. Towards the end of the guarantee year, some triallists grew resentful. See the YouView forum thread at https://community.youview.com/youview/topics/what_if_a_youview_update_bricks_my_box_after_warranty
The poster who started the thread (who was already pissed off at Humax over issues with his Foxsat box), posted the following:
Quote:…that I expect nothing from Humax after the 1 year period ends is based entirely on my knowledge of the dreadful way they treat Foxsat HD owners whose power supply capacitors blow after 731 days, despite this being a known fault with the ones they use. (For information, when mine went and the Argos receipt was blank through fading of the thermal printing, I was quoted £90 as their standard out of guarantee fee, despite the capacitors costing about £1)…
So when this allegation was first made on the YouView forum, it concerned Foxsat boxes, not YouView boxes. Chinese whispers transferred it to the DTR-T1000 boxes, and the high failure rate of T1000 boxes did the rest.
As far as I’m aware, no single cause has ever been identified for the excessive failure rate of T1000s. With a badly designed box which was forced onto the market by its ego-ridden stupid bosses when in development term it was years away from being ready, there could be any number of terminal-death Easter eggs waiting to be hatched. It’s just not correct to lay the blame for all this YouView management stupidity at Humax’s door.
In my personal experience, Humax offer a good level of customer support, and design and produce good boxes, when operating independently. Pity they decided to accept YouView’s terms, when all others barring Huawei dropped out. They might have foreseen they’d end up catching the blame for all YouView’s many disasters. On the other hand, the BT contract must have brought in a lot of cash over the past couple of years, so perhaps one shouldn’t waste too much sympathy. Hard on the techs and the customer-facing support staff, though.
Afaik there is not and never has been an issue with Foxsat-hdr power supply issues. Mine is still working with a 1TB drive installed in 2008.
The issue revolves around the notorious capxon capacitors as found on the old Thomson sky boxes.
The Foxsat-HD did have these though mine lasted about 2 yrs before they needed replacing.
Incidentally the Topfield 5800 had the same issues (I had to replace capacitors in my Topfield 5800). This box is still working (I gave it to my Grandson).
My take is that the mix of symptoms experienced by many users with their Youview boxes before eventual failure is consistent with an endemic PSU problem. I am two for two with such failures.
grahamlthompson – 4 minutes ago »
Afaik there is not and never has been an issue with Foxsat-hdr power supply issues. Mine is still working with a 1TB drive installed in 2008.
The issue revolves around the notorious capxon capacitors as found on the old Thomson sky boxes.
The Foxsat-HD did have these though mine lasted about 2 yrs before they needed replacing.
Agree with Graham re Foxsat HDR.
I have 2 working fine, one is older then any other publically owned 😉 – and is the one I use for updating the changes thread so booted many times a day.
And my Foxsat HDR has worked fine (ITV Accurate Recording in the early days apart) since 2010.
MontysEvilTwin over at hummy.tv did some interesting work on the DTR-T1000 problems. He found that the power supply is the same as that used in the late production HDR-FOX T2 models with the revised tuner arrangement. He used the power supply from a DTR-T1000 (with the stuck in nearly ready problem) in an HDR-FOX T2 and it worked fine in an extended test. There certainly are not many reports of power supply problems for the HDR-FOX T2 and I do tend to agree that the suggestion that all the DTR-T1000 problems are power supply related are unlikely to be correct.
My opinion – the guy I quoted was just trying to build a case for why Humax should give him another free YouView box, if his first one ever failed. He probably did exactly the same when his FoxSat failed post-guarantee. No evidence as to whether either box did or did not have a capacitor problem. It was just a ploy.
It’s unfortunate that the Sale of Goods Act is so complicated, and enforcing it is so tricky. He probably could have got a repair of the FoxSat via the retailer if he’d gone down that route.
Unless the T2 design is more robust in the face of out of spec DC delivery?
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