Tivo Exceeds All Expectations
Written: Aug 30 '00
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Pros: Innovative features, enhances TV watching
Cons: Wish it had higher capacity
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| mlv's Full Review: Philips TiVo PTV 300 Digital Recorder |
My husband and I bought the 30-hour Tivo (Sony recorder) three weeks ago, and it has completely changed the way we watch TV. This is an excellent product that has exceeded all my expectations about how it would work.
I had been interested in Tivo for a while, and right now (08/00) there is a $100 rebate on the recorder price of $399, so it seemed like a good time to buy. It is somewhat on the expensive side, but I decided to reduce up-front expense by choosing the $9.95/month service option. This seemed to me better than the $200 "lifetime" option, because that is only for the lifetime of the recorder, and who knows how soon this technology will be superseded by the next latest and greatest device...
In terms of the out of box experience, we had no problems setting it up (even though our TV is already attached to a stereo, VCR, Playstation, and DVD Player!) The one slight difficulty is that it needs a telephone jack, and we didn't have one in the same room; we solved this problem by buying a couple of extra-long phone cables and stringing them together to get to a phone jack in the next room (the Tivo comes with a long phone cable, but we had a really long distance to the phone jack).
My biggest concern before buying it was that you would have to use Best quality recording in order to get a decent picture. However, we have been using the High quality, which allows you to record 14 hours of programming (in Best mode it is only 9 hours). The picture in High quality mode is very good -- I have hardly noticed the difference between it and live TV.
All of the standard Tivo features are great -- pausing live TV and using Season Passes to record programs have been wonderful. Tivo also allows you to manually record a time slot (i.e., Tuesdays from 4:00-4:30 on the Learning Channel), which is very handy for shows in syndication where you don't want the Season Pass to record it the three times a day when the show is on in various time slots.
I would love to be able to add a second hard drive to the recorder to get more capacity... There are instructions on the Internet as to how to do this (e.g., http://www.avsforum.com is a good place to start), but it voids the warranty and is a somewhat involved process. With hard drive capacity increasing so quickly, it seems likely that there will be a version with an even bigger hard drive on the market soon at the same or lower cost... But this is typical with hi-tech devices. I'm very happy with the Tivo and I'm glad we bought it rather than waiting for higher capacity versions.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 399
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Epinions.com ID:
mlv
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Reviews written: 7
Trusted by: 3 members
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