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Originally Posted by Ed in Tx
I take it you have in your collection the CM-7000PAL? I'm using two Dish DTVPal DVRs which are basically the same. (Actually I have 4 of them, 2 in use, 2 spares just in case.) A few new capacitors, replaced the HDD once or twice, to keep 'em going.
How does these older units like I have compare to the new ones?
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It could take hours to answer that.
I have four DTVPal DVRs (the CM7000 DVR is just a rebadged DTVPalDVR), a CM7000 converter box, and 2 CM DVR+ units all working around the house.
The DVR+ has several nice features that do make them a nice addition, but there are some things that the DTVPal DVRs did much better. I don't want to spend the time doing full reviews here, but over at the AVS Forum you can see the many frustrations of owning either of the CM DVRs. They were always buggy units, and still are through several updates.
Just to mention why I keep the older DTVPalDVRs still in service is for things like sports where you want to be able to use a frame-by-frame or 1/15 slow motion that you can smoothly go forward and back several times to see exactly when that football came out of the hands of the runner. The new DVR+ only goes as slow as 1/8X, rewind only as slow as 2X, and if you try to go from forward to reverse, the video will jump a second or two. And the DVR+ has no frame-by-frame.
In addition the older unit will FF or reverse at 300X where the new unit will only do 64X.
The old unit has a button you hit once to turn on or off the closed captioning. The new unit you have to hit several buttons to take you into the audio menu to accomplish this.
The old unit unfortunately can only use PSIP data for its guide, whereas the DVR+ when hooked to the internet gives you a 14-day guide.
The DVR+ allows you to hook up external USB drives (I have 3TB drives on mine) while the older unit you had to crack open the case to exchange 1TB (max) drives.
Again, there are a lot of differences to each, its unfortunate that the new DVR didn't incorporate all of the things the older units did well and build upon them. Instead the new DVR+ seems like they just started with a different platform altogether. And CM seems determined to use the DVR+ boxes for more streaming services, rather than being just a DVR. I wish they'd focus more on making the best DVR they can rather than turning a DVR into a smart box.
So having both you can see a lot of pros and cons to using either. Neither is perfect, far from it. But both do an excellent job as far as quality of programming capture and playback.