I must have had the Philips DTR1000 (the DTR stands for Digital Terrestrial Receiver) for a good eight years now so it's a much older model of set top box, or freeview box, whichever you call them.

I originally purchased mine from Argos and I believe it was around £80 which at the time was at the cheaper end of the scale, especially for such a well known brand. If you were to purchase it now second hand I doubt it would cost you more than £10 though I haven't seen them sold new for a while and you'd probably have to go to eBay type places to buy one second hand.

The Philips DTR1000 is a nice looking set top box in that it doesn't just have to sit flat it can also sit in a little holder so it's vertical (like a Nintendo Wii can). It's made of silver plastic with a black screen with function buttons on the front and has a matching silver plastic remote control with rubber keys.

The box contained:

The Philips DTR1000
1 x Scart Cable
1 x Power Lead
1 X Remote Control
1 x Batteries (quite cheap ones which didn't last long!)

Instructional Manual
Warranty Card

The Philips DTR1000 is easy to set up, we still use it in the spare room and it connects to your external aerial and scans for freeview channels and digital radio quite efficiently. The EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) is quite out of date, now, unfortunately - it displays the wrong channel names and numbers and this is because I am not sure if Philips support this particular model any more. But it is 8 years old and is only used as a spare so we don't really mind. The EPG itself is a bit slow, which can be irritating and you do need to be patient with it but when you do get a channel on it's of a good quality and the sound is excellent, too.

The Philips DTR1000 is obviously very out of date now and you can pick up a faster set top box in the supermarkets now for around £10 - £15, but for it's time it was a reasonably priced and well featured set top box which came from a trusted brand. It's not HD, it can't record, and it doesn't do subscription services but for it's time the Philips DTR1000 was a great set top box and for that reason I'll still award it a 3 / 5 stars.