Bush DFTA11 review

There may be some great Freeview recorders on the market – take a bow, TVonics, Humax and Sony – but not everyone wants their digital telly served in a huge box with a 160GB hard-drive and HDMI on the side.

If you’ve got the box room or are just dipping your toes into Freeview waters for the first time, you need a compact, easy-to-use set-top box with a decent picture quality. And, amazingly, the DFTA 11 offers all of this for the price of a night out.

Good connections

Like most Freeview boxes in the budget price range, the DFTA 11 sports a simple array of sockets: RF in and out, and two Scart outputs. Bush has also included a pair of analogue stereo audio outs for good measure.

Set-up is easy and the onscreen menus are slick and well designed. And unlike some other budget units, the Bush isn’t too slow on the uptake – responding quickly to remote commands and doing its job without any fuss.

Review continues after the break…

The price is right

As we started to test the Bush we were still waiting on a confirmation from the manufacturer of its price. An excellent picture performance meant we expected it sit just under the £100 mark.

But rejoice, for those careless people at Bush seem to have mistakenly slapped a £30 price tag on this box and we confess to shamefully not mentioning this howler.

Instead, we slapped a five-star rating on this sleek silver tuner faster than you can say the words ‘solid’, ‘gold’ and ‘bargain’.