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Twenty years ago, when my wife and I first started seeing each other, I had occasion to buy a small 14-inch color television from Sears. It was even a Sears brand, not a major nameplate (although I realize Sears uses them to manufacture their electronics). That television has moved with us from Maine to Illinois to Indiana, back to Maine, and here to Massachusetts and it still works just as well as it did twenty years ago, when I paid something like $150.00 for it. These days it lives in the basement in the playroom/sewing space that Bridget and Charlotte share, relegated to third wheel behind our more recent television purchases, which get the premiere spots of the living room and the master bedroom. No other television I've bought in the last twenty years has come anywhere near lasting that long.
Over the Memorial Day weekend, the TV in our bedroom finally stopped working. It was just about nine years old, which is not bad for electronics, but not even close to that little Sears set. We knew it was just a matter of time when it began shutting itself off randomly. It would respond to the tried-and-true home repair method of whacking it a few times on the side, but when it would no longer respond to brute force, we knew it was toast. So I toddled over to Circuit City to scope out a new model.
In the last few years since we bought that television, digital TV and HDTV have become standardized at long last, and the foot-dragging over the long-awaited switchover to full-time HDTV broadcasting was finally mandated for next year. So what you'll find when you visit an electronics store these days is that the few traditional analog televisions being sold have been relegated to junk status and are available for birdseed, even the larger-screen models which used to command a pretty lofty price. The Luddites and bargain-hunters among you will be glad to know this, I'm sure. For the same price as that little 14-inch guy I bought in 1986, I could have bought a 27-inch conventional television set.
But, knowing what's to come, I looked at the various HD models and opted to buy one of those, which are now at last selling in the price range that traditional TV sets used to go for. It's quite easy to find an HDTV in the $500-800 range, and even some of the extra-large sets have finally gone under the magic $1500 price tag. Because I had the added constraint of needing to fit the set in the armoire-style entertainment center in our bedroom, there was only one model I could really buy: the Samsung TX-S2782H 27" "Slim-Fit". Sorry, no cinema-sized television for us this year, although when the TV in the living room buys the farm (it is 10 years old but still working fine, for now), we'll ditch the armoire downstairs and go for a wall-mounted big screen.
Hmmm...TiVo? Oh, yes, I'm getting to that part.
The new TV is awesome. While the majority of programming is not yet in high-def, the stuff that is high-def truly redefines television as a visual medium, and we're often surprised at the more complex and theatrical-quality sound that goes along with a lot of TV shows now (and even some commercials!). But just buying a new TV set didn't automatically bring all of these improvements to us. Oh, no. In order to get any of the HD channels that are available, we had to genuflect at the feet of the all-powerful god Comcast and sacrifice our plain old digital cable converter box for a shiny new HD converter box.
All things considered, it could have been much worse. I actually talked to a knowledgeable and helpful Comcast customer service rep on the phone to find out what I needed to do, and only had to wait on hold about 45 seconds, not even long enough for the Muzak to start repeating. Because I am handy with this sort of stuff, I was able to short-circuit a scheduled visit from a guy in a truck and went right to the local Comcast office and made the swap in person (didn't even have to scatter chicken entrails in the process), then took the box home and hooked it up.
The catch is this: our TiVo box is not HD-compatible, and so if we wanted to record or even watch HD, we would have to disconnect the TiVo and use the built-in DVR that Comcast cleverly pre-bundles into their HD converters. With a bit of uncertainty, that's just what I did, casting our beloved TiVo out and setting it alongside the corpse of our demised TV to await its fate. All did not seem lost, though, because we would still have a DVR to use, and the Motorola DVR that Comcast bundles is even a two-tuner jobbie so you can watch one thing and record another (a feature not available on single-tuner DVRs).
We're about four weeks in on using the Comcast DVR now, and I'll tell you that we have already decided that the very minute TiVo brings out its HD box (scheduled for sometime in the fall), we'll be buying it no matter how expensive it might be at first. The Comcast DVR works, but Jesus H. Tap-Dancing Christ does it suck to use. The remote can really only be called a clusterfuck. While the TiVo remote (designed by my former co-workers at IDEO) is a thing of elegance and intuitive simplicity, the Comcast remote suffers from the all-too-common problem of too many fucking buttons, and nothing put together in terms of usability.
We still have another TiVo unit in the living room, and it is so easy to use that Charlotte has completely mastered how to handle all of the major functions and is well-practiced at zapping commercials, finding her favorite shows in the "Now Playing" list, and even recording something on the fly. Meanwhile, neither Bridget nor I can seem to completely master how to navigate through the confusingly-named menu picks to distinguish between things we've already recorded and things we'd like to schedule, and when we try to watch something we've recorded, we invariably hit the wrong buttons for assorted basic functions because they are either too close together, or arranged in absolutely no logical way. Moreover, the Comcast DVR simply lacks a number of ease-of-use features. For example, the fast-forward seems to only have two speeds: not-fast-enough, and too-damn-fast. And it also lacks the feature that auto-rewinds about ten seconds from the point where you stopped fast-forwarding, which seems to correspond to just about how far beyond the commercial break you can stop the sucker while you're zapping commercials. With a TiVo, you can almost always land right at the point where the program begins again, but with the Comcast DVR, you invariably jump a good 15-20 seconds beyond the end of the commercial.
We also notice that Comcast's online programming guide is nowhere near as accurate in terms of knowing what will be on in the near future. Even right up to the day a show is scheduled to be broadcast, the Comcast guide is likely to be displaying something completely different, making it impossible to properly schedule recordings.
You know, when we bought the first TiVo a couple of years ago, I didn't really think I would like it all that much, but now that we have to use somebody's knock-off I have come to realize not just the benefit of the DVR in general but the absolute superiority of the TiVo product. I have to say that I think it's a huge mistake on their part to be waiting so long to bring out their HD-compatible box; the latest Series 2 box they introduced has more capacity and double tuners, but is obviously a transitional device that will only last until the HD box rolls out. I didn't feel like waiting four or five months to get to enjoy the features of my shiny new TV, so I bit the bullet with Comcast, but if you are sitting on the fence about this at all, I have to recommend waiting until TiVo ships their new box and praying that they're not delayed in doing so.
Meanwhile, if you're interested, I have a perfectly good second-edition Series 2 TiVo that I'm willing to sell to the highest bidder. E-mail me if you're interested.
I TOTALLY agree with you! I have a Series 1 Tivo and the Comcast DVR... and a 46" Phillips HDTV.
My guess is that Comcasts' DVR software sucks mainly because they can't infringe on Tivo patents.
I hate it that, when fast forwarding, you have no idea how far into the show you've forwarded. And it doesn't record by show title. If a show is bumped later by the network, you don't get it.
I record on both. My Tivo runs through a Samsung HDTV receiver that essentialy up-converts to HD. Looks good enough to me.
Brian Kane in Dallas
(.. a completely diffferent BK)
Posted by Brian Kane (completely different BK) [URL] at 06/24/06
I wonder why Tivo doesn't build a "comcast compatible" feature/unit?
Posted by Karan [URL] at 06/29/06
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