ReplayTV 3020 Digital Video Recorder
Pretty good box
I've had my ReplayTV 3020 for a week now and thought i would express my views on it.<br />The box has a lot of different setups, you need to choose the right one for you.  Personally I just split my cable feed and ran it to both my TV and the ReplayTV box so i can watch live TV or ReplayTV.  Then i have the Svideo out of the ReplayTV to the TV and treat it as a VCR.<br />First i gotta say, the compression ratings that ReplayTV would have you believe are not exactly accurate.  Standard recording quality can be as good as a VCR/Cable tv or worse it dependson the video being recorded.  If the images are big and there's not too much movement it's pretty good.  But if it's a crowd scene or a sporting event iwth lots of movement, it's worse than VCR.  It can be very grainy uniless theres little movement or it's a closeup.  It looks like you're watching an internet realvideo playback most of the time.<br />The Medium quality is a lot better, i'd put it up there the same quality as a vcr using Svideo out.  Highest quality is great, but if your'e going to record everything on highest you should get the 3060.<br />It has lots of outputs on it to go out to a PC for video capturing or a VCR to save to a permanent storage which is nice.  Also it has a few inputs, rca or svideo so you could record a DVD movie if you rented one and didn't have time to watch it unlike the Panasonic model which won't let you do this.<br />The ability to control real TV is nice.  It actually records as you watch live tv.  So you can pause, rewind and replay a live broadcast that you're not recording.  The bad part of this however is sometimes the audio/video get out of sync.  I'm not sure yet why this happens but it happens very seldom and it does clear itself.<br />The one great thing with this box is it doesn't come with the $10/month bill that TiVo has.  Who needs another bill?  And if you work in the cost of a lifetime membership to TiVo you could buy a replay.  <br />The box itself is pretty quiet and it's smaller than most VCR's.  It does have an off button if you want to turn it off, but i'd recommend just leaving it on.<br />The channel guide is nice. It's really easy to navigate around and select shows to watch or record.  You can use this to replace your cable box if you want, then you don't need a TV guide or anything.  I wish the channel guide displayed more listings per screen though, and i wish it started back at the beginning of the list instead of your current channel.  Overall though it's very easy.<br />I'd definitly recommend this box, it's been pretty good and i've enjoyed having it over the past week.