Excellent and irritating

This recorder does a fine job, but is not real smooth in the user friendliness. Why it is still built such that you must turn the unit off and keep it off until a scheduled recording time for it to auto-record is beyond me. This is an old vcr feature, that was corrected in my last vcr years ago, and of course, dvr's are also fully capable of doing the scheduled job as long as a tuner is available, since they are generally on all the time anyway. Also, I was very disappointed to have a couple failed scheduled recordings from tv (missed that Cowboys mnf thriller!) because you must set it to dvd drive (if using that drive)before turning it off, and leave it that way, or it won't record, even though you told it the proper drive in the scheduled recording setup!
Also, this box is very slow to spin up and tune in channels, like it really has to think a while before reacting.
The digital tuner is a great bonus to me, as we are on a high quality antenna only these days (until Verizon finally decides to add fios tv to the our internet and phone service), and so it provides us with the very clear digital ota channels, instead of the oft grainy analogs, to our older tv.
So, overall it performs great functions with excellent picture, but the useability is a real pain until you know how to baby it.