Review on 📺 TiVo TCD746320 Premiere DVR, Black (2010 Model): Cutting-Edge Entertainment at Your Fingertips by Steven Harmon

The TiVo TCD746320 Premiere DVR (Black) is a great product that will complement our video entertainment system very well. We've been using it for about 6 months and after learning how to deal with a deficiency, this TiVo worked very satisfactorily. Our setup uses an outdoor HDTV antenna (we're located about 50 miles from our transmitters) with a 1040p LCD TV. . The reception is stable. The picture quality is excellent. We can record two programs and watch a third, which is much more common than expected as prime time is fairly short and broadcasters like to line up their best programs. The controls work the same as ours. a former satellite video recorder, with small differences worth knowing. In most cases the command logic appears to be simple. The remote control is beautifully designed and comfortable. One downside (feature?) that we had to get used to is that the HDMI connection behaves strangely ("blink beep") if you don't end a previously recorded show properly. . This was very annoying at first as we thought it required a TiVo restart (takes about 5 minutes!). Through trial and error we found that we could simply turn the TV off and on again (30 seconds) to restore normal HDMI operation. Now, with slightly different operating procedures, we encounter the problem very rarely. We appreciate the TiVo's ability to stream from Netflix, which has been more successful for us than using our laptop. Netflix streaming puts a strain on our DSL service (nominally 1.5 Mbps) so we either have to give buffering a few minutes head start or suffer brief interruptions at random times. One area of television that (IMHO) remains untamed is program finding. TiVo has done as much as any other device to help with this, but there's still plenty of room for improvement. This TiVo shows and navigates current programs quite well. You can also easily adjust recordings for individual programs or the entire series. Browsing by categories is available, but it takes a lot of time due to the large number of uninteresting things. TiVo allows for some text searching of titles, but we think this is of limited value: 1) Entering text using the on-screen keyboard navigation is cumbersome, and 2) the search appears to have a limited time horizon. Problem #1 limited our attempts to understand or circumvent problem #2. As for the TiVo, being able to connect via a laptop with a decent keyboard can be useful. In the end, I expect these general inconveniences to be addressed with some improved computer-centric online features like an enhanced "TVGuide". There were a few issues mentioned in previous reviews that didn't cause us any problems. Some of them could be improved with firmware upgrades. Loading times are still very slow. However, we haven't had to download our TiVo in months. We don't find the menu unusually slow and didn't find it necessary to use anything other than the default settings. Most DVRs have slower menus than I'd like, especially when viewing future programs, but this model seems about as fast as the others. Some people don't like the cost of Sony's subscription to TiVo programs, but we find it competitive (we generally save money by using wireless signals). This model has a 500GB hard drive. If you plan to capture a lot of HDTV, add a high-capacity external hard drive, or buy the Sony XL model with a higher-capacity built-in hard drive. Together, this TiVo has become a worthy addition to our entertainment system. I would recommend it to anyone with similar needs.