Pioneer DVR-533H-S Slim Design DVD Recorder with 80 GB Hard Disk Drive
What Could Have Been
This is a story that starts out happy, but that has a sad ending. I bought this DVR for my technophobe wife, so she wouldn't have to keep swapping VHS tapes to record her two favorite daily shows. She loved the unit, and was able to learn to use its controls in a single afternoon. She navigates through the menus, and through her shows, like a pro. The unit lives upstairs, but if she wants, this unit makes it simple to dub her shows off to DVD so they can be watched in the living room. Using a 4X DVD-RW, it takes only 15 minutes to copy two one-hour shows, in high-quality mode, to the DVD. If you've already done the math, you may have noticed that the copy speed is actually 8X; I don't know why, but that's how it works, and it looks great. <br /> <br />But now for the sad part -- the TV Guide feature. Although it works very well in my area, is intuitive to use, and even labels your recordings, it is ANNOYING! I plugged the unit in the day after Christmas; since that time until now, (almost a month later), the unit has downloaded TV Guide data a minimum of 12 hours a day, and often goes as many as 18. And while it downloads, the hard drives chatters away, much like your PC doing a thorough virus scan. Pioneer's site dismisses this with a statement that says the unit has a lot of data to download, and that is why it takes so long. However, I have an ancient PC with a tuner card that uses the very same Gemstar guide as this DVR; somehow, this slow old PC is able to download all the data it needs, delete the old listings, add the new listings, and do all the data sorting in UNDER 3 MINUTES! So just WHAT is the Pioneer doing in the minimum 84 HOURS it spends downloading a week's listings? Even if the DVR were downloading the data at a fraction of normal dial-up speed, there is no way it should have to run 84+ hours a week. <br /> <br />So the sad ending is this: This otherwise well-designed DVR is killed by a horrendous design flaw in its TV Guide \\"feature\\". Whoever perpetrated its design should hang their head in shame, then immediately head back to the lab to start over. As it is now, I would label this unit a \\"don't buy\\".