One great idea!
Written: Jun 26 '01
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Pros: It's so easy, anyone can use it. 30 hours is a lot of time.
Cons: You may end up fighting for your share of the 30 hours.
The Bottom Line: It's the only cheap way I know to control your television and stay out of "The Outer Limits."
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| garytheguy's Full Review: Philips TiVo PTV 300 Digital Recorder |
I have had my TiVo for 6 months and have never regretted getting it.I have it hooked up to my Digital Cable and it works very well. I had minor problems early on with the channel changing accuracy, but it was just a matter of changing codes. It does what it is supposed to do and with a recent system upgrade, even more.
Here is what it does:
1. It allows you to record (on an internal hard-drive) up to 30 hours of television, and watch it later. You can watch something that was previously recorded while it is recording something new. For instance, you can watch a recorded movie from Tuesday on Wednesday while recording "Spin City". Then you can watch "Spin City" on Thursday while your kids are recording Sesame Street, etc.
2. When you watch the playback, you can scan through commercials, making you wonder why you would ever watch "live" TV.
3. It gives you info (with subscription service) on the current show, the recorded shows or future shows.
4. It can create "Wish Lists" with the new upgrade. What this means is that you can "tell" TiVo that you like Patty Duke and it will let you know when she is appearing.(Or any other person) It will do the same for titles or "key words" like Disney, etc.
5. (What my wife calls the spooky part) It lets you pause "live shows" so you don't miss anything - I told you it was spooky.
6. The new upgrade let's you adjust your start or stop time in increments in case you think a president's address or something like that may mess up the start time and the stop time. It also allows you to record a program in progress that you didn't set or forgot to set or said "I wish I would have recorded this".
There's more, but so much more, I would ruin any surprises.
Some very basic specs:
It records 30 hours on basic (a bit better than SLP VHS) and on "best" it is near DVD quality but limits the recorder to about 9 hours. The sound is excellent. 2 TVs can be hooked up to the outputs. It outputs to a VCR for archiving. If you don't get the TiVo subscription you can still record but don't get a lot of the extras.
I pressed my brain for something that I didn't like about it and came up with two minor points.
1. It's rather large in comparison with other video components
2. I wish it could record to an outside digital source.
All in all it's as close to a video miracle as I want to get.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 210
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Epinions.com ID:
garytheguy
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Reviews written: 18
Trusted by: 2 members
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