Manhattan Plaza HD-S2 Digital Satellite Receiver

Product Information

With the Manhattan HD-S2 Freesat HD Box in place, your living room will be filled with consistently great entertainment. Subscription Free TV in HD Over 150 free TV & radio channels from freesat, with six TV channels in amazing HD

We have no hesitation in offering a high score; it's worthy of being the only single-tuner freesat HD receiver you need in your home." The Manhattan Plaza HD-S2 allows you to easily create up to eight lists of your favourite channels, then use them to filter the Programme Guide, so you only see the ones you want to. The Manhattan Plaza HD S2 gives you the full complement of Freesat’s 150-plus channels including all the HD channels, non-Freesat channels (things like Sky News and Press TV which you have to manually add) and over 30 digital radio stations. The HD•S2 produces sharp, solid high-definition pictures. With ITV HD’s Long Lost Family for example, shots of various outdoor locales are engagingly crisp and bright. Objects have hard edges and there’s no break up as the camera pans. The Manhattan HD-S2 Freesat HD Box gives you a wide-ranging range of TV viewing options to stay entertained every day, and it comes with a newly designed remote control for maximum ease of use.

On Demand TV* including BBC iPlayer & ITV Player means that even if you do miss a programme, you can catch-up with the best of the week's TV, at a time that suits you.

If over 150 freesat channels are not enough, you can automatically add hundreds more non-freesat channels, and combine them with freesat channels on the same favourites lists. Setting up the Plaza HD S2 is as easy as it should be. You attach an LNB cable to the LNB input, switch it on, set the display resolution to your requirements and wait while it scans for channels. The only impediment was entering our post code to set our television region, as you have to input letters using an onscreen number pad, and you have to cycle through letters as you would with an old mobile phone when texting. The process could be a little slow at times and we sometimes entered the wrong character because we overcompensated for delays. The box also supports interactive TV, digital text, Audio Description and subtitles. The HDMI output will send pictures to your TV in 576i, 576p, 720p, 1080i and 1080p, while on the audio side it supports Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Digital and HE-AAC. Fire up the EPG and you’re greeted by a list of categories to filter your search. The guide itself is well laid out, with a wide eight-channel programme grid, plus helpful colour-coded shortcuts along the bottom and the synopsis at the top. There’s no live TV screen though.This release improved the abilityof the HD-S2 to scan for the Freesat Home Transponder in case its location changes in the future. Please see the includednotes. Adding Favourites to a list is a convoluted process – in the Channel List, highlight a channel, hit the star key, choose a list to add it to then hit the star key again, followed by OK. That’s more long-winded than it needed to be, but it’s a useful feature nonetheless. You can also rename each list using an onscreen keyboard. If over 150 Freesat channels are not enough the Plaza HD-S2 can automatically add hundreds more non-Freesat† channels. And for true power viewing, the Plaza HD-S2 makes it easy to create and use up to eight lists of your favourite channels, then use them to filter the Programme Guide, so you only see the ones you want to.

We’ve spent some time getting to know the Plaza HD S2, which will be in the shops from Monday, August 12. Here’s exactly what you get for your money. It’s one of the first Freeview receivers in the UK to implement the latest version of YouTube, which can be controlled by a smartphone or tablet. The beauty is that you don’t have to pair your phone or even open the YouTube app on the receiver – just press the TV icon in the YouTube smartphone app, select the Manhattan from the list of devices and it will start playing on your TV, assuming your phone and TV are on the same network. But here’s the brilliant part – you can create your own EPG based on your Favourites lists. When you see the EPG’s genre selection screen, hit the swap button and select the relevant Favourites list. That brings up a stripped down EPG containing only the channels in your list, rather than making you wade through loads of channels you don’t watch. Manhattan Plaza HD•S2 – Performance The set-top box also stores up to eight lists of favourite channels, enabling you to access what you love more immediately.Similarly all the BBC apps loaded without hesitation and streamed content without any glitches. Picture quality is excellent too, boosted by the ability to watch in HD. YouTube is a joy to use and looks terrific, using large thumbnails for each video with genre-based short cuts on the left and a handy search tool. Weirdly, the online apps operate a lot faster than the box’s own software. With On Demand TV including, BBC iPlayer and ITV Player, you can catch up with the best of the week's TV, at a time that suits you Fixed an issue with ITV Player where it was displaying a ‘50070’ error when trying to play ‘itvbe’ programmes.

Any SD programmes also available in hi-def have an HD logo next to them in the EPG. You can also set reminders through the EPG, which displays a message onscreen when the programme is about to start. Online content can be accessed in the On Demand section of the EPG or through the channels’ interactive services. Similarly, the Plaza HD S2’s electronic programme guide (EPG) could be slow to respond to our commands, and we often pressed buttons again because we thought they hadn’t registered with the unit even though they had, which sometimes led to unwanted channel or menu changes. However, this isn’t something that’ll stop you wanting to use the Plaza HD S2. The Plaza HD-S2 must be connected via Ethernet to a minimum actual broadband speed of 2Mbps for On Demand TV services.As well as giving you access to a huge array of channels we love having BBC iPlayer and ITV Player on board. How to set up a Smart DNS service on a router – access UK On Demand Services when outside the UK November 4, 2023