Anyone Own a Dvr-640H Yet?

[Razortceps]

Im buying one on Monday for $355 as a discount from a store my friend works at and was wondering if anyone had any reason why they think I shouldnt get this model other than it not having firewire.

[redwudz]

I have a 633H-S and I've been happy with it. Even the EPG. The 633H-S has a FireWire input. I haven't used it, but I think they made a mistake in eliminating it in later models.

[satwar]

Im buying one on Monday for $355 as a discount from a store my friend works at and was wondering if anyone had any reason why they think I shouldnt get this model other than it not having firewire.

I just bought one yesterday and I am very pleased. I was up and running with chasing playback in a few minutes. Very please with the user interface, very easy to find everything you need. Since I only get channels through my satellite STB, hence picture & sound comes to the recorder via audio/video cables, I was very happy that the Initial Setup menu has the option "Do Not Scan For Channels". Manually scheduled recording offers all the options you can possibly need, like recording only Monday-Friday" and an excellent feature called "Auto Replace Recording". Only tried XP recording quality but I can't tell the difference from original image. Very quiet operation. It's so easy to use I keep thinking I've forgotten to do something, but I haven't. I'll never use a VCR again.

Some people complain about the remote. and it is kind of cheap. I'm not sure why they hid the buttons on the bottom half of the remote, but it does give a very simple clean look and for basic useage I don't use the buttons under the door anyway.

The only operating feature that I have noticed that may be cautionary for some users is that although frame accurate editing is permitted it is not preserved when high speed copying. Frame accurate editing can be preserved during real time copying & re-encoding but at the cost of some quality loss, of course.

As you have already mentioned A/V interconnection types are limited, so be careful if these are important to you. No firewire input for digital camcorders, no video component input, no optical digital audio output, no HDMI output with upconversion. These bells & whistles were probably cut to control product cost so if you need any of these features you should look elsewhere. At the price, video quality and ease of use and setup this unit made me really differentiate between my needs and my wants (nice to have but not necessary). Since my satellite service does not carry TV Guide, the satellite STB only gives me a composite video signal to feed the 640H (my S-Video goes directly to the TV), and I still view programming on a CRT TV, my decision process was relatively simple.

Overall I think it represents excellent bang for the buck. It has exceptionally good manual timer recording features and is a dream to setup if you don't have or don't want to use TV Guide programming. It may not do everything but it does everything it's designed to do well. I bought mine for $C449 and am very pleased.