Philips DSR7000 Combination TiVo/DIRECTV Satellite Receiver
Pretty good - could use improvement
This is my first TiVo and first DirecTV. This thing is amazing. It's truly a whole new way to watch television. It's very easy to use and the quality is great. There are just a few things I wish they would add or change.<br />The dual tuners lets you do some incredible things. For example, say you're watching channel A live, then switch to channel B. You watch that for a few minutes, then decide you might have missed something on channel A. You can pause channel B, switch back to A, and rewind it to catch what you missed! Insane...<br />The integration is pretty smooth between the TiVo and DirecTV interfaces, although in combining the two, they stripped out some features from each. My biggest gripe is that the program guide is the regular TiVo one. The program guide on standalone DirecTV units is much faster and slicker. You also don't get the DirecTV feature that lets you browse channels by logo.<br />Also, even though this is a Series 2 TiVo, the USB ports seem to be disabled. Unlike other series 2 TiVos, you can't connect it to broadband - you're stuck with the phone line. And The Home Media option doesn't seem to be available. Hopefully a software update will enable these features.<br />Finally, it would be nice if it had component video output, but that's not a big deal for me.<br />It does have optical audio out and s-video out, so you still get pretty darn good quality. And of course, you don't lose any quality when recoprding like a standalone TiVo - which is by far the best feature of this thing.