TiVo TCD540080 (80 GB) 80-Hours DVR

I was impressed by the promise of TiVo, but the promise was not met by reality. It is a very good concept, but sadly let down by the hardware provided. This is disapointing, as a parent who rarely gets chance to watch a program when I want it, without being interupted by diaper changes, feedings, story times etc, I wanted flexibility. What I got was flexibility, but also a severe degredation of my TV watching.

For a start when hooked up to my Comcast cable box it became painfully slow. Previous snappy channel changes now took an agonising 5 seconds no matter how I controlled it or set it up. Try flipping through your Favorites selections with a 5 second wait between each channel!

Also the picture was AWFUL. No amount of fiddling with the TiVo, cable box or TV could get rid of the crud imposed by the TiVo. The problem here is that the TiVo digitises & then undigitises the TV signal, whether you're recording something or not. Because the process is substandard you get cruddy pictures at all times. Blacks were the worst affected, being muddy & prone to shimmering which was very distracting, with obvious steps in brightness appearing in the black & grey areas. Movement on screen gave way to loss of definition that would pop back when movement stopped, which was once again obvious & distracting. Lots of repeated action on screen would give rise to mosaic blocks in the picture. Sometimes there were even repeated Digital Artifacts appearing on screen, those annoying green, or blue scrambled squares that show up due to mistakes made by the CODEC process. I could accept a sloppy picture while watching a recording, but NOT all the time, even when watching Live TV.

I was advised to try another box when I contacted TiVo & told them of this problem. I did, 3 times, with no improvement. This was when I realised that an awful lot of people took their TiVos back to the shop as each one I had already had someone's name in the menu set up. I can't say I blame them.

TiVo is a good idea, but it has been built way too cheap & it shows. Even the remote was a pile of crud with tiny buttons that were hard to use. The lack of a 2nd tuner was also a killer. If you have digital cable your first 100 channels or so are actually analog, so no problem, you can watch one channel & the TiVo will record another as it has an analog tuner in it too. Same goes for watching a digital channel while the TiVo records an analog channel. But the TiVo has no digital tuner, so if you watch a digital cannel you can't record another digital channel on your TiVo at the same time.

When it works it's great, the ability to let it record programs repeatedly without your internvention is fascinating & a great boon. Controlling real time watching, the ability to pause a program you're watching & restart it, is superb. But the drawbacks of awful picture, dreadful operation & poor controls meant it was out of the question & I took my 4th TiVo back for the last time & got a refund.

Then I switched to a Comcast digital DVR box. The change was like stepping out of the night & into day. This is how the TiVo SHOULD be! I had all of the promise of the TiVo without any of the drawbacks. Picture quality is excellent, the remote is superb & the menu system is every bit as good. Functionally there is some small niggles compared to Seasons Pass on the TiVo, but they are VERY small. However the analog channels dont' suffer from any obvious degredation & the digital channels are very bit as good as they always were.

When you compare the prices the Comcast box wins hands down too. It is a free upgrade & the monthly cost is the same as a TiVo, so I get it all without spending $100 on a TiVo box. In conclusion, if I had shares in TiVo I would sell them FAST. I can think of no reason anyone with digital cable or satellite TV would want a TiVo.