OTHER TECH

In short, using the Samsung S4120R was - surprise! - exactly like using any TiVo box, with one enormous difference: better picture quality. Why? With a standard broadcast/cable hard-disk recorder, the RF signal has to be first demodulated, then digitized, then formatted by a real-time MPEG-2 encoder so it can be stored on the hard disk, and then converted from MPEG-2 back to analog video. That's a heck of a lot of processing, so it's no wonder picture quality suffers. Compared with good live broadcast reception viewed "straight," HDR video is usually softer, a bit uneven in color, and peppered with motion artifacts, especially on fast-moving sports programs. (These may be seen as visual "stutter" or as an occasional blocking up of backgrounds, especially stadium crowds.) And all these problems become worse when HDRs are set to their more space-saving compression rates.

Now compare this with what goes on in the Samsung S4120R. Here, the satellite signal is already MPEG-2 encoded at DirecTV's uplink studios by the best hardware and software money can buy. All the HDR part has to do is act as a "bit bucket," grabbing the data sent from the heavens, holding it for a while, and then sending it back to the DirecTV section for decoding. It doesn't matter whether the data was stored on the hard drive for a few seconds, as when you're watching live TV through the HDR's buffer, or for several days or even weeks, as when you save a program to watch later. In either case, because the S4120R doesn't have to do any real-time MPEG encoding, its picture quality is identical to that of a nonrecording DirecTV receiver - and inherently superior to any broadcast/cable HDR I've encountered.

Images were perfectly noise-free, without a trace of snow, and were smooth most of the time, with occasional glitches on fast-moving material like hockey games. DirecTV picture quality isn't perfect - you'll often see harsh colors and lack of shadow detail - but that's not the fault of the Samsung receiver, or at least not entirely.

Since the S4120R is recording a signal that's already digitized, there's no Good/ Better/Best choice of bit rates to determine picture quality (on broadcast/cable HDRs with built-in MPEG encoders, lower rates let you store more programs on the hard drive, but at the expense of picture quality). The recorder's capacity, which Samsung specifies as "up to 100 hours" of programs, is based on what's being sent down from the satellite. (The bit rate of the DirecTV signal varies from channel to channel and from second to second depending on the program content.)

An episode of The West Wing that I recorded on the Samsung HDR looked so sharp and natural, I soon forgot I was watching a recording and not the prime-time broadcast.

Picture-wise, my local stations didn't look as good as the big cable feeds like CNN or ESPN - images were softer and more prone to what seemed to be coarse-grained video noise, and even some ghosting - but, again, I can't blame the S4120R for that. In any case, local-channel picture quality was distinctly better than what I get from my Comcast analog cable feed. An episode of The West Wing I recorded looked so sharp and natural that I soon forgot I was watching a recording and not the prime-time broadcast.

One of the TiVo/DirecTV combo's most compelling features is that you can schedule pay-per-view showings in advance, recording them for viewing at any time with full use of the pause control. No more worries about missing the climactic scene when your cousin from Canarsie calls - or you have to run to the bathroom. This feature, even in light of the $3.99 cost of a pay-per-view movie, makes PPV a whole lot more appealing - and, in fact, is the only way satellite TV can compete with the movie-on-demand service offered by cable.

Another great feature is the Samsung's dual-tuner capability. With a dual-LNB satellite dish, you can record two programs on different channels even while you're watching a third that you've already recorded. You can also record a show while watching another live.

Turning to the remote control, which you depend on for all those cool features, I found the buttons to be sensibly laid out for the most part, though I wish the Guide and List keys were bigger and more prominent. I also wondered why Samsung/TiVo buried the useful channel/program-swapping function, assigning it to the lowest-right button on the handset (labeled Enter/Last) - as far as I'm concerned, this is the most important button of all!

I really love the Return key, which delivers instant-replay of the last 8 seconds - one of the most powerful features of any hard-disk recorder - but I found myself wishing there was an equivalent skip-forward command like ReplayTV's QuickSkip. If you want to jump forward, say, 2 minutes, you have to fast-scan to the location using the > and < keys. There are other, multiple-keystroke methods to jump forward in larger time increments, but in either case it's pretty clumsy.

The onscreen guides were well organized and clear. My only gripes: I wish there was a faster, less keystroke-intensive way to page ahead a couple of days in the program guide, and I wish the program-guide page changes and channel changes were faster - but I have the same gripe about virtually every electronic program guide that I've used.

Otherwise, I found little to fault in Samsung's SIR-S4120R, and plenty to love. This leaves the question of cost. In addition to the S4120R's own tag of $399 (substantially less if purchased in a dealer's DirecTV-service promo package), there's the cost of the DirecTV service - all kinds of packages are available, starting at about $39 a month, and you'll have to figure out whether any of them make sense for you. On top of the program-package subscription, you'll have to add another $4.99 a month for a TiVo subscription unless you subscribe to the $90 Total Choice Premier package. The other option is to pay a one-time fee of $299 to enable TiVo service for the life of the S4120R.

Is it worth it? It's obviously an individual choice, having to do as much with your TV-viewing habits - I won't say addictions - as income or lifestyle. But being able to time-shift DirecTV programming - including PPV offerings - with absolutely no penalty in video quality is compelling. In fact, it spectacularly enhances the value of DirecTV's vast, though not inexpensive, television cornucopia.