Panasonic PV-HS2000 ShowStopper 30-Hour Digital Video Recorder
Wow!
When I first bought this product, I felt a little silly spending so much money.  But after enjoying it for six months, I think it was money very well spent.  With my VCR, I was always messing up setting the timer, forgetting to rewind the tape, or suffering through poor-quality recordings because the tape had been used too many times.  The Replay solves all these problems and more.  Setting it to record is effortless, and it's very easy to get it to record the same show every week or every day.  There's no rewinding, and the quality is great, even on the extended setting.  My favorite feature has got to be the Quickskip, which fast forwards 30 seconds at a time so you can move through commercials at lightning speed (TiVo doesn't have this feature).  My only complaint is that the infrared blaster that changes the channels on my digital cable box isn't always reliable, so the wrong channel gets recorded on occasion (although less frequently than I used to screw up the VCR!)  All in all, this product is amazing - I ask myself every day how I ever lived without it!