For movie lovers, HDTV TiVo is Nirvana =)

32 hours of Hi-Def recording, or 200 hours of regular recording?



September 21, 2006
David Pogue
Costly, Sure, but It?s Nirvana for TiVo Fans

As any technophile can tell you, the best technology doesn?t always become the dominant one. Just ask fans of the Macintosh, Minidisc or Betamax.

So imagine how fans of the TiVo must feel. Here?s a machine that can time-shift, pause, and slice and dice TV broadcasts, simplifying lives and family schedules all over the country. It?s an elegant, refined device whose name, à la Google, has become a verb (?I?ll TiVo it?).

And yet most people considering a digital video recorder (DVR) these days don?t get TiVo?s. They rent generic boxes from cable companies.

Now, these boxes are to TiVo as an oxcart is to a Maserati; their creators, it?s painfully clear, do not share TiVo Inc.?s obsession with polish and elegant simplicity. But a cable company?s DVR costs about $5 a month, versus $13 a month for the TiVo ? not including the purchase price.

TiVo has chosen not to fight the cable companies on their own lowball turf. The very long-awaited, high-definition TiVo Series 3, released last week, aims for the high end. It?s meant to be the ultimate DVR, the cream of the cream. The question is, How many people are willing to pay $800, plus $13 a month, to bask in its glory?

The biggest-ticket TiVo Series 3 feature is, of course, its high-definition tuner. Two, actually, so that you can record two shows at once ? and even play back a third simultaneously.

Those tuners let you do everything earlier TiVo?s do, like choosing shows to record from a list (without having to know their broadcast time or channel), pausing or rewinding live TV, zipping past commercials, recording the same show every week automatically, and generally bending the broadcasters? schedules to your whim. But this TiVo can also record both regular TV shows and gorgeous wide-screen high-definition shows. The 250-gigabyte hard drive inside can hold 32 hours of high-def video or 200 hours of standard-definition recordings (at medium quality).

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/21/technology/21pogue.html?ref=technology


Tina, if you want start a thread on electronics (as long as it does not violate the TOS), fine. But this comes too close to spam.