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

Bored with paying basically $200 per month to my cable company, I decided to ditch one of my DVR's and swap it with an HDD DVD burner with digital tuner.  After all, some programs need to be burned to DVD and saved  "forever" instead of being recorded to a hard drive on a DVR unit which will ultimately fail or be turned in.  I bought the Magnavox MDR515H from Amazon after paying a visit to two local Best Buy outlets.  Neither carried any DVD burners.  Bottom line, the recognition of such units is nowhere close to VCR levels.

I selected this item over the cheaper Magnavox MDR513H because this is a newer model and that i found Magnavox (Funai) handled any troubles they may have found with the MDR513H.

Immediately after receiving the item, I set it up, auto programmed the channels,  and mastered the primary features in very little time.  This unit works and functions fantastic, and it really is quite easy to use - particularly if you actually owned a DVD burner before.  Basically, it's a DVR with a DVD burner along with a 500 gigabyte hard disk drive (records up to 620 hours).  In fact,  the video quality is comparable to and also the audio quality superior to the DVR it replaced.  NOTE: always use an HDMI cable to obtain true movie quality.

I'm very happy with this unit.  Unfortunately, if we (the public)  do not buy enough DVD burners, the market may continues to be decline and we all will have squashed the most effective defense against high cable expenses.