DIRECTV HR21700 Receiver/Digital Video Recorder Equipment Leasing

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Hold out for the HR20 instead!
Reviewer: Philip from Seattle, WA on Jan 18, 2008
291 out of 366 found this review helpful

As 2009 approaches and the deadline looms for all broadcast stations converting to the ATSC (digital broadcast) standard, there's no reason to have to shell out an extra $5/mo to DirecTV what you can already get for free with the right equipment.

It's also inexcusable for DirecTV to have designed a flagship HD-DVR and to have left an ATSC tuner out of it... unless of course they're trying to herd you into paying that extra $60/year.

Don't buy a DVR without one: ATSC tuners mandatory in TV sets... why shouldn't you also be able to record your favorite off-the-air programs? (Indeed, most ATSC tuners can also do QAM256, and do digital cable if it's 'clear', i.e. unencrypted.) Should you have to buy a separate DVR for off-the-air programming?

The HR21 andHR20 currently both cost $200. Go for the one with the richer functionality.

That said, both the HR20 and 21 suffer from poor navigation: a lot of the things that used to take a single button-press on my SAT-HD300 now take 6-7 presses.

Navigation is not intuitive. You can't create shortcuts. And the boxes have scaling (zooming) issues with letter-boxed SD content when watching over an HDMI connection fixed to 1080i resolution (the vertical aspect ratio will not remain constant).

You can't use Media Center to watch content remotely (I spend a lot of time on the road... so catching up on my DVR content from hotel rooms would be a win) which is sorely missed. Nor even use the Internet to set-up DVR recordings from a web-browser. One wonders why they even included a network connection.

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Great product
Reviewer: CJ from Encinitas, CA on Oct 9, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

DirectTV has worked very hard to make this worthy of being their flagship receiver. It was rough at first but through countless firmware upgrades and more to come, you won't be sorry. Even better if you can connect it to your home network to enable on-demand.

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Easy install easy use
Reviewer: Vicki from Florida on Sep 11, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful

This was easy to install and use. No problems so far.

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