Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was very excited to find this product as there are so few options in this category which I find very surprising. Most people must get a DVR with their over-priced monthly Cable\ Satellite subscription. Not me, I'm too cheap to spend $80/month on TV so I just have basic cable for $15. Like most people I have a VHS recorder but the quality on those recordings is pretty poor compared to broadcast quality, let alone HD. It might be fine for a soap opera but try watching a tennis match and you can hardly see the ball. I labored over trying to find a cheap DVR. At first I could hardly find any products at all, then I discovered that Magnavox had two DVR's in the $300 - $400 range. I read some reviews and there were a lot of complaints about these units getting fried when they lost power and not coming back on again. That was bad but the deal breaker for me was that it would not record in true HD, only SD. I had pretty much given up and then I stumbled across this device. It was only $200 but it DID record in HD, had a 320Gb hard drive and could handle digital and analog signals transmitted over unscrambled Cable. I have basic Comcast ($15/mo) and DO NOT have a cable box. So I purchased one of these from Adorama camera (via Amazon) and was excited when it came. After plugging it in and having it scan all the channels it could not find most of my digital channels and the Analog ones were so filled with snow\static as to be unwatchable. I played with all the various settings, multiple cable, different TV's and was satisfied that the unit was the problem. I called their tech support the next day and had a very poor experience, the guy said that was as good a picture as I was going to get, which was ridiculous. So I returned the unit and got a full refund so I was only out the original shipping. I decided to take a gamble and bought another one from a different source and I'm very glad that I did. After hooking it up it found all of the channels plus some I didn't even know about. The interface is very easy to use and the quality of the picture and recording is excellent and you would NOT be able to distinguish live from recorded. Recording a program is easy and there are three different ways. 1) Just press the record button on the remote for the channel you are watching. 2) Use the program guide which pulls information that is distributed over the digital signal. (I did not know this existed). It's no TiVo but it is quite handy and makes the recording very easy to do. 3) Simply schedule a recording based on date\time, channel and duration. You can set these to record once, every day, weekends etc. Playback is likewise very simple. Simply browse the list of recordings (if it's off a digital channel it will have the name of the show, otherwise it will have a date and time) and press play. There are fast forward\rewind options which let you got from 1.5x - 32x normal speed which is handy for skipping commercials. It passed the girlfriend test quite easily too and she is able to watch, record and play shows without any involvement from me! I give it 5 stars because of it's price performance. It does not do commercial skipping or pause live TV, but for $200 it has all the necessities plus some nice extras that exceeded my expectations and met all my needs. ****** Update ******* I've had this product about a year now and I'm still very happy with it for the price. I have got rid of basic cable and now do OTA only which works great. We don't watch a lot of TV but use this for sporting events and a few TV shows and it continues to do it's job and provide a good quality picture. There are quite a few negative reviews of this product so I believe they have some quality control problems (as I experienced first hand) and that is why there is such a disparate range of results.