A Breakdown On Digital Video Recorders

Still haven't gotten a Digital Video Recorder (DVR)? Until you use one you just don't know what you're missing.

So what's so great about digital video recorders? Here is an excellent article that breaks down the uses and advantages of DVRs. It starts: We live in a big, wide, wonderful digital world. So how come so many people still record their favorite TV shows onto big, wide and not so wonderful analog VHS cassette tapes? Until recently, in-home digital video recorders were too expensive and hard to find and using them was a technical black hole for many. The good news today is that prices have come down, digital video recorders are available just about everywhere and manufacturers now emphasize ease of use in both their designs and advertising. The only bad news is for VHS cassettes and all of us who have to figure out how to dispose of them.

The digital video recorders we have here include at least a hard disk drive for initially capturing video and a DVD recorder for saving hard disk recordings. They also come with high capacity hard drives you can record hours of commercial DVD quality video in standard (lowest compression) mode and three to four times as much in the lowest quality (highest compression) mode. When it comes to quality, a hard disk recording will usually blow away a VHS tape recording and there's no contest between hard disks and VHS tapes when it comes to capacity.

Also, when it comes to electronic devices, my wife doesn't show a lot of interest. The interesting thing is she fits in with an article that says women control the DVR. The article states: Based in a national survey of 1,000 DVR users divided equally by sex, 48 percent of married women say the decision to purchase a DVR was their own, while 55 percent of the wives claim they understood how to interface with their unit's myriad features better than their husbands. It says: "Three-quarters of the women surveyed said that the reason they fell in love with DVR is that they are extremely intuitive and much easier than a VCR," Brooks said. "Rather than selling DVRs as techie tools and having the marketing message come from the engineering department, [operators] need to simplify" their DVR pitches.

The DVR has to be the one electronic device in the house that my wife shows real interest in (and oh yeah, she has about 90% of the recording space for herself!).

Article by faye bautista

About the Author: The author writes about dvi vs hdmi vs component video and blogs at http://www.wiredhome-weblog.com/.