Zenith HDR230 HDTV Personal Video Recorder

September 2003

multipage

After the channel scan, I brought up the on-screen channel guide to see what was playing. The Zenith uses PSIP (program system information protocol) to generate its on-screen guide. Because not every broadcaster sends PSIP information, I only ended up with program listings for two of the five channels. Still, I lucked out that night, and found that ABC was showing an NBA Final between the Spurs and the Nets in high definition.

I'm not much of a basketball fan, but the picture produced by the receiver was irresistible. The level of detail was superb. Shots of the commentators and sideline coaches revealed patterns in their suits not visible on the analog broadcast. Close-ups of the players' faces showed every crease in their expressions, making the experience more life-like. Wide shots also looked great, though sometimes I'd see alias artifacts on curved or diagonal lines. These imperfections cre-ated an occasional shimmering effect on some of the court lines, and in one case, on the pinstripes of an announcer's suit (let's hope he doesn't wear that suit again). Those few errors weren't enough to ruin the show for me, and if you weren't intentionally looking for something to complain about, you probably wouldn't notice it. The picture jumped off the screen. Of course, the widescreen presentation

creates a much more involving experience, especially for sports. The audio came in as a Dolby Digital surround signal, and the Zenith box handled it very well. In the basketball game, most of the surround sound came from fan activity in the stands, making the viewer seem more like a participant, rather than, well, a viewer.

Of course, the big deal is in the product's recording options. When you're watching something and want to save it for later, you just press the record button. A counter comes up asking you to select the record duration in 30-minute increments. Since the recording is being made digitally onto a hard drive, there's no need to worry if you have a tape inserted. Your program will be permanently recorded onto the hard drive until you delete it.

Recording schedules are handled fairly easily through the navigation buttons on the remote; you can select the channel, date, time and duration of the recording. You can also set it to record at the same time on a daily or weekly basis. It's not as simple as the one-touch recording possible with a TiVo, but it's much better than a VCR. If broadcasters send reliable PSIP program data in your area, you can schedule recordings from within the program guide.

To view what you've recorded, go to the on-screen program list. Depending on the infor-mation available, the list may give you the program's title or, more likely, just the time and date it was recorded. Playback is intuitive and allows you to quickly skip through commercials at a rate of 50 times greater than normal speed. Picture quality of recorded programs was as exceptional as the original broadcast. Recordings I made of CSI, The Guardian and the NBA Finals were impressive. When the recording is over, you can leave it on the hard drive to watch again, or delete it to save disc space. The program list's counter tells you how much free space is left.

A particularly neat trick is the HDR230's editing feature. During playback of recorded HD programs, you can select commercials and delete them. Since you have to be watching the program as you edit it, the feature isn't much use for programs you expect to watch only once (in that case, it's easier to just fast-forward though commercials), but for something you intend to save for a long time, it's a winner.

One of my favorite PVR uses is pausing TV. While there is a Pause button on the Zenith remote, it isn't for pausing live TV. To do that, you press the Time Shift button, which begins making a one-hour temporary recording. Then you can pause the program, fast-forward to catch up or rewind back to the point where you pressed the Time Shift button. I found it was a good idea to use this feature at the beginning of every program, just in case I wanted to pause it at some point during the show. If you decide you want to make this a permanent program on the hard drive, you can use the Edit feature described above.

There are a few things this box doesn't do, which may be important to potential owners. First, it doesn't let you replay or scan backwards into a program that you haven't already started recording, either with the record button or the Time Shift button. Unlike the non-HDTV PVRs on the market, the Zenith product doesn't constantly record the selected channel, so it has no reserve buffer to replay. Second, you can't pause or rewind a program while it is being recorded unless you use the Time Shift feature, but this capability doesn't work during regularly scheduled recordings. Third, it doesn't give you program information beyond a few hours, so you can't search for programs days in advance. The on-screen information guide comes from the broadcaster itself, and not all broadcasters supply schedules anyway, so the on-screen guide is no replacement for TV listings in the newspaper (get local HDTV program info at www.titantv.com or www.zenith.com). Of course, all those features come with other PVRs for a subscription price. The Zenith HDR320 costs you nothing more once you've paid for the unit. There are no monthly or lifetime service fees, no fees for broadcasts and no worries about changes to the service. All the features are built into the box at birth. 

While I've been a bit spoiled by some of the friendly features of TiVo, the comparison is somewhat unfair. The Zenith HDR230 is one of the few options out there for recording HDTV. The other option is a digital VCR (offered by JVC, Mitsubishi and Marantz), but it uses tapes and requires an additional HDTV tuner. This unit's off-air signal reception is commendable, and the performance of every feature was top-rate. If HDTV is important to you, you'll easily learn to live with the few quirks this piece has, and love what it does well. As more broadcasters turn their line-ups over to high-definition, products like this will become indispensable.