Pioneer DVR810HS DVD Recorder/Play

I recently bought a Philips DVDR985. It does not have built-in TiVo. These are currently available under $400.00 from Audio Advisor. I found the play and record quality superior to the Pioneer, which I looked at very closely because of the TiVo capability. I have a friend who bought the Pioneer piece and has been through three of them in about a month because of various failures. I also noticed that the Philips is quite a bit heavier than the Pioneer. That may mean nothing but it may mean a better transformer and solider chasis. It could make sense to buy the TiVo separately with the Philips. However, my best suggestion is to look very closely at both and make the decision that you are comfortable with.

Jependleton, thanks for the useful info. Although Costco is very good about returns, I'd rather buy equipment that didn't have to be returned.

First - you can get it at a lot better price than that. (I paid 719.00 at Best Buy). Second - be aware you are buying an 18 hour unit unless you can live with pixelation problems about every 3 min. on all but the highest recording level. Pioneer knows there are problems with these units on all but the "extreme fine" recording level...which, if you use it, means you have 18 hours of recording time. That's the downside. The upside is you can quickly and easily dump programs off the TIVO hard drive onto DVD-RW or DVD-R and watch them later. And you can watch TIVO (live or recorded) while its dumping programs to DVD. Pioneer says they are working on a "fix" for the lower recording levels...So far nothing is available though. Also, the lower recording levels are of lower quality than what you are used to on your regular TIVO. In order to record at a bit-rate that will allow the MPG files to transfer to DVD (TIVO is always recording in MPG) Pioneer had to lower the bit-rates for all but the extreme-fine quality setting. Bottom line, I have it, I am not happy about the problems with it, and....I am keeping it because of the time it saves in dumping programs off to another media.