It's been a long time since our primary television-recording dilemma was a simple matter of choosing between VHS and Beta. The intervening years between the much-lauded advent of the videocassette tape recorder and these days of astounding recording choice have been busy ones for those in the consumer electronics industry, with the result that the lay person simply wanting to tape their favorite show while they go out for the evening can feel a little unsure about which way to turn. With videocassettes quickly becoming a thing of the past, the television recording public are feeling the urgency of familiarising themselves with the new methods of saving their favorite shows for later. So let's take a quick look at what makes digital video recorders so great.



Digital video recorders work, in very basic terms, by copying the shows you want to see later directly on to the hard drive stored within the device. This very conveniently eliminates the need to store a multitude of cassette tapes, or even DVDs, and allows you to say a not so fond farewell to those hurried moments of scurrying around at the last moment, desperately trying to lay your hands on a blank tape before you miss the all-important first five minutes of your show. Most of the hard drives included in these digital video recorders are rather large, meaning that you can store almost as many shows as you would like - you'll never again have to wait for re-runs to see that episode you loved so much.

But surely this capacity to store shows on the digital video recorders hard drive is something of a disadvantage too - doesn't it eliminate also the portability of the cassette tapes we used previously? Does this mean that we can't share shows that we've taped with our friends, or bring the recording with us when we visit their homes? On the contrary, digital video recorders are more share-friendly than ever. Shows stored on the unit's hard drive can be transferred to DVDs, offering you that same convenience or portability you enjoyed before. But digital video recorders can also allow you send the shows you have taped over the Internet, meaning that sharing recordings is more instantaneous than ever before.

The barrage of new technology that hits us almost every day can undoubtedly be daunting, but much of it is actually quite easy to master. You don't necessarily have to understand the nitty-gritty of a digital recorder's innards to be able to enjoy the simple convenience it offers. And once you master the recorder's simple operations, you'll never go back to those burdensome cassette tapes.