Hide Tivo series 3 delivers as expected Author's Rating: Our local cable company rents a Motorola HD-DVR as its high-end box. This is hands-down one of the most poorly usable products that I'm ever had in my house. Its amazing...
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Hide Tivo series 3 delivers as expected Author's Rating: Our local cable company rents a Motorola HD-DVR as its high-end box. This is hands-down one of the most poorly usable products that I'm ever had in my house. Its amazing that millions of cable customers all over the world are not revolting against this engineering disaster. And its not only the slow and confusing remote that frustrated me, but also poor quality hardware. Being an R&D engineer myself, I do appreciate a good design, and the Motorola not. For example, it gets very hot, even in the 'off' position. It burns no less that 30 Watts day and night, frying the collection of antique VHS tapes in my multimedia cabinet. So, does the Tivo series 3 fix these issues, and is it worth the steep $1000+ dollar premium for the box + service? I think it is. It offers the familiar excellent usability of the Tivo DVR, while adding HD and a large 250G harddrive. The box is sleek, well-designed and literally, as well as figuratively 'cool'. The HD playback is smooth, and simply works as you'd expect. The menus respond slightly faster to commands than the series 2 Tivo that I have. The menu is much clearer in HD, thanks to the fact that the unnecessary conversion to an analog signal has been eliminated. Picture quality is probably as good as it gets given the inputs. Otherwise, this series 3 works just like the series 2 minus a few web features due to cable card copyright issues. Since I wasn't using that anyway, I do not care. The set-up was easy: I plugged in a network cable and the HDMI cable, and it worked basically out-of-the-box. I had to call Comcast for the cable cards and pick up their sorry Motorola box. Comcast had some trouble dealing with the dual cable cards. The installer had never seen a Tivo before, but despite that, the cards worked fine. The main issue was that they did not know how to charge for the service. This was only resolved after long consultations with supervisors (the first cable card is free, and the second is $1.50 per month). In summary, this is a good HD version of the conventional 2-tuner Tivo series 2. The Series 3 offers no surprises: its well engineered and simply works well. It enabled me to get rid of that crappy hot Motorola HD-DVR box. If you can live with only cable service and a $1000 hole in your pocket, this is is probably the best you can get at this time. Oct 16, 2006
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