Digital video recorders: don't throw away your VCR just yet.(Viewer's Choice)(Cover Story)(Buyers Guide)

A DVR is a couch potato's dream come true. These set-top boxes allow you to pause "live" TV broadcasts, grab a sandwich, then pick up where you left off without missing anything, courtesy of an internal hard drive that keeps recording. Their interactive program guides let you simply click on shows from an onscreen menu to watch or record off cable, satellite, or an antenna, rather than entering codes or times and channels, as you must with a VCR.

DVRs are a rapidly changing market, however. You'll find falling prices for older models as manufacturers introduce new ones with added recording capacity. Case in point: the high-scoring Sony SVR-2000 and Philips HDR312 still available from last December's report. Each of these DVR models now sells for $300, compared with $400 last year.

The Sony and Philips can hold up to 30 hours of programming on their hard drives. Newer models that weren't out in time for testing, such as the $2,000 Replay TV 4320, promise as much as 320 hours of recording time--the most to date. We plan to report on higher-capacity DVRs in a future issue.

DVRs aren't likely to replace a DVD player or VCR in most homes, however. You'll still need either of those machines to watch rental movies, since a DVR can't play disks or tape cassettes (see our reports on pages 30 and 34). And because stored recordings eat up space on a DVR's hard drive, you'll need a VCR and tape if you want to keep a permanent copy of the TV broadcasts a DVR records.

WHAT TO CONSIDER

How crisp, how clear? The Philips and Sony DVRs we tested delivered as good a picture in their highest quality settings as the best VCRs. But as with a VCR, a DVR's picture suffers in the lower quality settings needed for maximum recording time. We've also found that a mediocre signal is more likely to worsen picture quality on DVRs, since they must digitize and compress signals before saving them to their hard drive.

How much? DVRs rely on one of two service providers for their program guides. One is TiVo, which has a partnership with Hughes, Philips, and Sony. ...