Purchased from Wal-Mart for $198.

The old DVD recorder I had lacked many of the features this recorder has so given its low price I snatched one up straight away.

This recorder features both NTSC Analog and a Digital tuner. It has a built-in 80GB hard drive so you can record directly to the HD instead of a DVD and do so-called time-shifting so you don't miss a program when your viewing is interrupted. It includes facilities to dub from DVD to HD and HD to DVD, and to edit out scenes, such as commercials.

The digital tuner down-scans to NTSC, but it picks up some digital cable chans. On my TW system it picks up the music channels and a few broadcast stations but not all of the digital chans.

The 80GB hard drive they say can hold up to 96 hours of video at slowest speed. I imagined that 60 hours at a higher speed would be my limit for decent quality video but even on the slowest speed the video is quite good. I'm viewing on a regular analog TV. On a digital set the quality at slowest speed may appear different.

Editing a scene is not as tedious as I thought it might be. In fact, it's quite simple. Go to the edit menu. select one remote key where you want the edit out to begin. Fast forward to the end point. Press another remote key then the delete key. Viola, it's gone! You can easily edit out commercials, for example, from programs or movies before dubbing to DVD.

Press the Tim Shift button and go out and get a pizza. When you come back you can continue to watch from where you left-off just like with TiVo^™.

One oddity is that while it has Closed Captioning for HDTV it doesn't have it for analog TV.

Another is that when you record the unit can not be set to watch another program, as far as I can tell. So you may want an A-B switch for your cable.

You can not control the unit from your computer but who needs to?

I haven't burned to DVD yet, just HD, but so far I'm well pleased with this unit for the price.

Specifications