Standalone DVD recorder w/ HDD

[The AD]

Anyone have one? My wife wants one for Christmas. Here's the two I'm looking at:

Panasonic DMR-E85HS http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...X0DER&v=glance

Toshiba RD-XS52 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...X0DER&v=glance

The specs on the Toshiba look a little better to me, but I can't find any reviews for it.

Basically she's looking to archive a lot of VHS tapes. With the hard drive units you can copy the tape to the drive, cut out all the commercials, then archive to DVD.

[optics]

There's a Wired magazine w/reviews of these (and a bunch of other toys) on the stands right now, FYI.

[The AD]

Cool, I'll have to check that out.

[Jumper Bones]

TiVO to add pop-up ads during fast forwarding (specifically, when you're fast-forwarding through commercials)! You cannot escape! You will be assimilated! Resistance is futile!!!

BOOOOOOOO!!!

[The AD]

I definitely won't get a TiVo unit. I think the TiVo based ,odels don't even allow you to edit the shows recorded on the hard drive, so you can't even cut out commercials. what kind of horseshit is that?

[Jumper Bones]

Yeah, it's just a hard drive...no editing available.

I guess TiVO's competitor (can't remember it's name) orignally had a feature allowing it to skip commercials during recording...however ad companies sued and got them to delete that capability on later models.

So, if you do the searching and find those old models...cha-ching. However, good luck getting them to work with modern TV programming.

TiVOs do have USB connections as well as RF and RCA out jacks, so you could daisy-chain them with DVD recorders somehow...but I imagine the integrated units give less headaches.