Following on from yesterday's rant, it's easy to find disc or hard drive-based recorders that will do the job of a VCR, but the point of these new digital recorders is they have the potential to do so much more.

I've looked at quite a few and the Topfield TF5000PVRt or TF6000PVRt are probably the best choice if you want a hard drive recorder. They have digital tuners but you need to be a bit tech-savvy if you want to subscribe to the IceTV seven day program guide. The downside is they don't have built-in DVD recorders for archiving recordings, much means you can't tape something for a friend. They also don't have high definition tuners yet.

If you've got Foxtel then a Foxtel iQ recorder is probably your best bet, although they were having trouble working out the bugs.

A digital tuner is really essential if you want to use your new recorder for more than five years when analogue is switched off. DVD recorders are coming out with digital tuners, but I wouldn't touch a recorder without a hard drive. I consider a DVD just a big VHS tape, you're still going to fill up pretty quickly and they you'll end up hunting through a pile of discs for a blank one - the same scamble you do now for a blank VHS tape when your favourite show is about to start. At least with a hard drive recorder you can just hit record and not worry about where you're recording it or if there's enough room. Combination HDD/DVD recorders are the way to go, they've starting to come out with digital tuners but you won't see many with high definition digital tuners until the move up from DVD recorders to Blu-ray or HD-DVD, which has the capacity to hold a movie in high definition. While most of them have the ability to extract a seven day program guide from television broadcasts, it isn't much use because the Australian networks refuse to broadcast one. If you want to manually set your device to record the same show every week, stay away from the LG recorders until they fix this problem.

If you're ready to take the plunge, all this should help point you in the right direction. If it all sounds too confusing, probably best to stick with your VCR for a little while yet. Digital recorders will very quickly get cheaper, better and easier to use in the next few years - so if you're not in a hurry perhaps hold out and see what comes along.{moscomment}

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Adam Turner  Digital TV  Gadgets  Video