We’re going away next week (more on that later). Unfortunately, our little holiday coincides with the World Figure Skating Championships, and my wife is a rabid fan. So, there’s 10 or 15 hours of television to record, and Julie is suddenly disposed to buying some new recording technology.
We bought a Pioneer DVR-533H on sale for CAN $429 plus taxes. It replaces our aged VCR and now redundant DVD player. It’s got an 80 GB hard drive, which amounts to 17 hours of recording at the highest quality, and about 170 at the lowest. Given that I’ve never wanted to permanently save a TV broadcast in my adult life, I think that’ll be plenty. If I suddently go all squirrelly and want to save stuff, I can just move it over to a DVD.
I was surprised to see that the device also has TV listings built in, using a TV Guide service. I gave it my postal code, and it actually provides listings for my tiny local TV provider, Novus. There’s no subscription cost associated with this service.
For my relatively limited TV watching needs, I think this is the right fit. Finally, after writing on and on about this topic, I hope I can put it to bed for a while.
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