How Did I Live Without DVR All This Time?

I hooked up with DISH network almost a year ago and I am so glad I went with the DVR option. I have the dual tuner, standard definition 100-hour recording model.

As the title of my review implies, this is my first DVR and I love it. I rarely watch live TV anymore. The recording features incorporate seamlessly with the program guide to give you tons of options to record your favorite shows. You can brows through the guide or search for shows by keyword. Once you find a show, simply select it and if it airs at any time in the future, you get a menu to let you decide your recording options. You can choose to record just once, a specified number of episodes, all episodes, or just new episodes. You can even set to record any number of minutes early and late so the very beginning and end don't get cut off accidentally.

The 100 hours of recording time has turned out to be plenty, except for the times I go on vacation and forget to limit the number of recordings on certain shows. If you stop playback of a recording and come back to it later, you can simply resume right where you left off. You can also quickly delete or protect any recordings very easily.

One thing that you have to be careful of is when you limit the number of recordings of a certain show, it will automatically replace the oldest recording of that show unless you set a higher priority or protect it. I ended up losing a show I had not finished viewing because it replaced it before I came back to resume viewing it.

The menus and navigation are pretty straight-forward, but due to the number of features and settings, there is a bit of a learning curve. Watching and navigating through recorded shows is a snap with the forward and reverse controls. There is skip forward (30 seconds), skip back (10 seconds), and fast forward and rewind that, with repeated button pressings, advance at 4x, 15x, 60x, and 300x.

The program guide can be set with many personal preferences and favorite channel groupings. You can browse and search the guide by channel, just channels you subscribe to (for example hiding premium movie channels), show type (sports, etc) and others. You can even change the scrolling method so as you go down the guide, the channel numbers either increase or decrease.

With the dual-tuner I can record two shows at once or watch one show and record another. I can even watch a recorded program while recording two shows simultaneously. When I do that, however, the search features understandably run a little bit slower, but it's nothing major. When I want to record a show I am watching, I simply hit "Record" and get a quick menu of how to handle the recording of the show. Whether a show was recorded on TV1 or TV2, all shows can be viewed on either TV.

The only problems I have had with my DVR 625 are that every once in a while, playback of a recorded program will experience a short skip, and a couple of times, playback froze. On the skips, I simply hit the skip back button and then it replays the skipped part with no problem. When it freezes, I have to stop the playback, turn the unit off and back on, and go back to the program I was watching. The freezing only happened twice, so I will not call it a big problem at this point.

Overall I am very happy with my DISH DVR 625 and would recommend it. In fact, I did recommend it to my brother and now he has the same setup as me, but he got 150 hours of recording capability. I pay an extra $5 per month for having the DVR on my satellite tuner.