Panasonic PV-HS1000 ShowStopper Digital Video Recorder
The Tool for Competent Television Watching
I was paying $... a month for my cable connection, but I never knew when things were on and I had an appalling habit of flipping endlessly around the channels. Every time I happened upon the shows I liked, nauseating waves of commercials would intrude. I had Bravo which showed great films, but the commercials ruined them. Now, with Showstopper, I can watch TV competently. I turn on the TV and can immediately get to a nice list of shows that I've preselected, including the late night comedy things that came on after I fell asleep. I can select from the list, even pause partway through, watch something else, then come back to the very point where I left off. With one button, I can leap over the commercials. What a relief this thing is! I love it! If I miss a what it was that made the audience suddenly laugh, I can hit the replay button and get it, even when I'm watching a show live. If someone needs to talk to me, even in the middle of a live show, I can pause, talk and go right back. We used to say, save you're comments till the commercial, now we can talk whenever we want and then go back to the show. You can control your own time, which is a really enjoyable power that TV normally deprives you of. This is a great improvement over making VCR recordings: you don't have to find a tape to put in, you don't have to worry that you run out of tape (though you might run out of space on the hard drive, you have much more room), all your recorded shows appear on a nice list displayed on screen so you can scroll and click your choices, programming is easy and intuitive, it finds all the shows in the schedule for you. The downloaded schedule comes in every night (&quot;while you sleep&quot; they say, not accounting for nightowls and insomniacs!) and lets you search more than a week ahead. It has a function that lets you search the schedule for all shows in particular categories (e.g., classic comedy movies, letterboxed movies, shows about animals) and you can use the cursor tospell out categories that you want to find (e.g., everything with Claude Rains). It comes with a 15-minute instruction video featuring the most normal man in the man in the world sitting in the most normal living room in the world with the most normal wife in the world calling to him from off-camera--I found rather touching that Panasonic put so much thought into trying to create a feeling of peace and reassurance and quite funny that they choose exactly this guy to create that feeling. At the same time, I learned a lot. My TV competence level has skyrocketed with Showstopper. This is probably the coolest electronic device I've ever bought. Am I sorry I didn't pay another $... and gotten the one with more memory? Maybe. I figured these things will get cheaper and with more and more memory. The more expensive one will seem small by future standards, so why not save $...? But if this one isn't available, go for the better one. I do think this is better than Tivo, because of the monthly fee. I haven't compared all the features of the two machines, but mine has just great features and has been a great pleasure to use.