We live in a big, wide, wonderful digital world. So how come so many people still record their favorite TV shows onto big, wide and not so wonderful analog VHS cassette tapes? Until recently, in-home digital video recorders were too expensive and hard to find and using them was a technical black hole for many. The good news today is that prices have come down, digital video recorders are available just about everywhere and manufacturers now emphasize ease of use in both their designs and advertising. The only bad news is for VHS cassettes and all of us who have to figure out how to dispose of them.

The digital video recorders we cover here include at least a hard disk drive for initially capturing video and a DVD recorder for saving hard disk recordings. With high capacity hard drives you can record hours of commercial DVD quality video in standard (lowest compression) mode and three to four times as much in the lowest quality (highest compression) mode. When it comes to quality a hard disk recording will usually blow away a VHS tape recording and there's no contest between hard disks and VHS tapes when it comes to capacity.