Topfield Australia has finally released a high definition Personal Video Recorder, yesterday announcing the TF7000HDPVRt sporting twin high definition tuners and HDMI output. The 250GB hard drive holds roughly 70 hours of SD or 30 hours of HD recordings.

Topfield's long-awaited high definition TF7000HDPVRt

Topfield make arguably the best PVRs available in Australia, so a HD version has been highly anticipated. The TF7000HDPVRt has been two years in the making and some people were starting to doubt it would ever appear, there were even rumours the unit would be released by another company under another name. Well, it's here now - selling for $AU1299 - and I hope to get my hands on one to review in December.

Glancing at the spec sheet, I have to say I'm disappointed that it doesn't have a wifi link like the TF6000PVRt released earlier this year. Why Topfield can't just put an Ethernet port in there is beyond me, it would make the device much more versatile and allow it to automatically download the IceTV seven day program guide as well as access other internet services.

The frustrating thing about the Topfield PVRs is, even with HD, they're only half of my dream device. What I'm after is dual high definition digital TV tuners for recording two programs at once (tick that box), a hard drive recorder with the ability to pause live TV and watch the beginning of a show whilst still recording the end (tick), a seven day electronic program guide (tick), a DVD player/recorder (no) and the ability to record from external devices (no again, the 70000 doesn't even have the 6000's SCART input, which you can't record from anyway). It would also be useful to be able to play DivX video files, plus have Ethernet and/or wifi for accessing the web and playing files from a network drive. The only way to get all of this in one device is to buy or build a Windows XP Media Centre Edition computer. MCE boxes are versatile but expensive, and I want something more reliable than a PC at the heart of my lounge room.

Zensonic's Z500

Australia's Zensonic (soon to be renamed Ziova) makes the excellent Z500 media player (soon to be renamed the Clearstream CS505) covers all of these missing features except for the ability to record. Zensonic and Topfield seem to be diverging on my dream device from different directions, it will be interesting to see if one of them is prepared to take the plunge and incorporate the features of the other. Crossbreed a Z500 with a TF7000HDPVRt, throw in a DVD or even Blu-ray burner, and you've got yourself the ultimate home entertainment device.