Magnavox MDR515H 500GB HDD and DVD-R with Digital Tuner

Tired of paying almost $200 per month to my cable company, I decided to ditch one of my DVR’s and replace it with an HDD DVD burner with digital tuner. After all, some programs deserve to be burned to DVD and kept “forever” rather than being recorded to a hard drive on a DVR unit that will eventually fail or be turned in. I purchased the Magnavox MDR515H from Amazon after visiting two local Best Buy stores. Neither carried any DVD burners. Bottom line, the popularity of these units is nowhere near VCR levels.I selected this item over the less expensive Magnavox MDR513H because this is a newer model and I figured Magnavox (Funai) addressed any issues they may have had with the MDR513H.After receiving the item, I set it up, auto programmed the channels, and learned the basic features in little time. This unit works and functions great, and it’s fairly easy to use – especially if you’ve owned a DVD burner previously. Basically, it’s a DVR with a DVD burner and a 500 gigabyte hard disk drive (records up to 620 hours). In fact, the video quality is comparable to and the audio quality better than the DVR it replaced. NOTE: always use an HDMI cable to get true video quality.I’m very happy with this unit. Unfortunately, if we (the public) don’t buy enough DVD burners, the market may continue to dwindle and we will have squashed the best defense against high cable bills.