I built a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD dual freeview HTPC for under half that - with a top of the range ATi GFX card it even manages as a high-end video games machine too (with better GFX than my 360).

Why pay so much when you can have PC that does everything and more for far less?

(i appreciate this is freesat not freeview but a card isn't the price difference)

Can't a PS3 do most of this?

Sounds like we are back to the early days of DVD recorders - each brand seemingly using a slightly different finalisations process so you end up with a lottery as to whether other machines will be able to read your finalised Disc.

Yet another reason not to bother with BluRay. At the moment you risk spending £150 (ish) on a player that will have to be replaced in a couple of years because it can't read the Discs your PC's built-in BluRay recorder is producing.

These manufacturers are a bit quick adding copy restrictions and other measures that the consumer doesn't want but has to pay for, meanwhile being the real pirates themselves. Possibly highway robbers would be more accurate than pirates. A two hundred quid price hike for putting in a 500G disk instead of a 250G one!!! A 50 quid premium should be more than enough to get a 1.5T jobbie fitted.

If I was in the market for something like this, I'd wait to see what the Koreans come up with, bound to be better value than products from the land of the setting sun.

Freesat mandate the copy protection restrictions be implemented in licensed devices. Manufacturers have no choice. I've been told that BBC and the other broadcasters have forced copy protection into the Freeview HD specification too.

I don't see why they bother when the broadcasts are unencrypted, the manufacturers must hate it, viewers hate it and it doesn't secure anything.