When our local TV stations began broadcasting digital channels, my trusty analog Pioneer DVR began to lose it’s usefulness; I could still record digital channels when filtered through a converter box, but I could no longer “set and forget” my recordings, since the channel had to be changed at the converter box. So began my search for a new DVR with a digital tuner.

I found this product (the Magnavox H2080MW8) on clearance at Walmart for around $80 in May 2008; they had two left, so my dad and I each grabbed one. Since that day, I have yet to see another HDD DVR at Walmart.

Anyway, I got the DVR home and immediately began noticing how minimalist this DVR is compared to my Pioneer. The on-screen interface is more reminiscent of a VCR than a DVR, and navigation is extremely non-intuitive. Almost every button on the remote is identical, a series of TINY squares specifically designed to make use in the dark impossible.

Learning to burn discs on this machine should be worth some college credits. Whereas the Pioneer offered a simple (yet extremely customizable) wizard for burning DVDs, this DVR requires the user to know enough on his/her own to make certain settings to the machine in one menu, navigate to another menu to burn, close out of all menus, then navigate to another menu to finalize! Otherwise, you’ve wasted a disc and a load of time, and you have to do it all over again. Extremely user-hostile, if you ask me.

All of the aforementioned flaws (and more, believe me) were annoyances to me, but I figured that I could live with them so long as the trade-off included me getting to watch, edit, and burn my digital programming. Recently, however, the hard disk in my DVR has been acting up. Days-old recordings become garbled, minutes at a time are corrupted beyond playability, and I’ve even had portions of one recording show up in another during playback. To me, these are all symptoms of a sick hard disk, one in need of optimization and defragmentation. My Pioneer has a function that allows me to optimize and deframent the disk, as should ANY device that utilizes a hard disk drive; no disk drive can survive a long period of time without being maintained. Alas, Magnavox scrimped on this functionality, which basically makes their hard disks ticking time bombs.

I’ve owned this DVR for 9 months, and the HDD recording is already becoming useless; without HDD recording, this is just a crappy DVD player. I’m currently in contact with the manufacturer with “high hopes” of getting an exchange unit, but I don’t expect the new one to live longer than a year; after that, I suppose I’ll try to remove the hard disk and defragment it myself.

A word to the wise: if you have the opportunity to buy a Magnavox H2080MW8, run like hell in the opposite direction.

—————-UPDATE – 4/6/2009—————-

I received an exchange unit from the manufacturer (Funai, by the way; NOT Magnavox, as the label states), and I had to get that one replaced, as well; it arrived with a completely non-functioning tuner (neither analog nor digital). The third unit arrived with a DVD tray that refused to open; looks like it will be going back as well.

As it turns out, all of Funai’s exchange units are refurbished, which apparently means that they just re-shelve faulty units until someone demands a replacement, then they mail them out to the new owners; it’s kind of a fun “grab bag” deal where you get to play detective and figure out what specific problem YOUR unit was suffering from before they sent it to you. As long as they want to continue paying to ship DVRs back and forth to me, I’ll keep swapping out my DVR until I finally get one that works.
Rating: 2 / 5