HR10s selling for under $200 on ebay

Well, as the hype of the HD channels becomes more active in the coming weeks, it only makes sense that the value of the HR10-250 would diminish.

Direct will do everything they can to diminish it even more. They don't want the HR10-250 to be here. Instead they want you to have an HR20, because that means they'll own you for 2 more years. They don't even care if you like the non-Tivo box, because once you take it, you're theirs.

I wouldn't even be surprised to see them buying up the boxes and then ditching them.

 

What I find amusing, are the ones the scratch and dent center are selling - if they get one in with a parental password, (and thus can't be reset without taking the cover off), it goes for next to nothing. (like $30) If 6 tuners isn't enough, I am watching too much TV, so I haven't bothered.

 

D10, the satellite that will carry the new MPEG-4 HD channels, not available on the HR10, was launched Friday evening and is expected to be fully functional in September. At some point in time, MPEG-2 HD channels will be shut off leaving the HR10 good for only ATSC and SD DIRECTV programming. Most folks are aware of this and won't pay for equipment that they can't receive new and future HD programming. Maybe weaknees will even have to drop his price.

As far as the HR10s getting "hard to come by", the fact that the price is bottoming out on eBay says to me they aren't exactly scarce.

 

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Simple supply and demand. Unless you prefer Tivo and you're serving out a programming commitment and your HR10 dies, it makes no sense to buy one now. Bite the bullet and switch to cable or get a rentention deal for the in-house offering.

 

scratch and dent center?

 

Look around for stuff listed as "as is" - one place is called "dealtree", they apparently take returned stuff, test it, and re-sell. If they can't clear it, it goes out "as is".

 

Yeah, I saw the price drops too. I was planning to sell mine since I canceled D*, but now I will keep it and just use the dual buffers for OTA HD.

 

I just bougth one with a new 750 gig drive. I have $385 for it and all I really wanted was OTA recording capability. I don't care about the other HD content right now. So far it's not all it is made out to be. If they ever get those 150 HD channels going and the content missors all the good current channels then I'll look at some kind of switch.

While I could have bought a $200 unit and paid $150 for a 750 gig drive then did the upgrades etc. myself I found that the purchase of a unit (which had a known good hdmi port) was a deal. I don't have the time to spend upgrading etc.

 

If they get _15_ channels going, beyond what my H10-250 gets right now (including all locals), 15 channels that have anything I'm willing to pay for, I'm theirs, even with their HiDef lite.

Some basic principles that make Tivo (the s3 and/or the Tivo powered DirecTV HiDef HR10-250) a much better solution than DirecTV alone:

1. OTA HiDef beats anything DirecTV is currently putting out, not even close.
2. A "basic" cable HiDef setup gets me about a dozen additional HiDef channels, not quite as good as OTA but miles better than DirecTV's HiDef lite, plus a bunch of useful standard defiinition channels, for about $9 per month. Admittedly I have my internet over cable so I get a $10 or so discount.
3. Redbox/Netfilix for a TOTAL of about $15 a month gets me all the recent releases I need at DVD quality (not HiDef and not at all comparable to OTA HiDef, but in the ballpark of DirecT's HiDef lite).

For sports packages and some specialty channels, maintaining a DirecTV subscription for the HR10-250 still makes sense for me, barely. But DirecTV is on the bubble.

 

You really need to get out and about more because if you're talking about MPEG-4 HD quality, I submit to you this review by Scott Greczowski from the SatGuys forum. Focus on the part where he grades MPEG 4 PQ on a scale of one to ten and keep in mind that Scott is no DIRECTV fan. There are times when I felt he could give hourly updates on the current temperature in Charlie Ergen's back pocket. If someone like that assigns that grade, it carries a lot of weight with me.

 

Absolutely! My expertise on DirecTV's way of implementing mpeg4 is zero, a few hours looking at other peoples' TV sets where I have no idea how they were set up and did no objective measurements.

It is _possible_ that in general DirecTV will move forward to advance quality from megp2, as opposed to downgrading to approximately the same quality and simply using the compression efficiency to get more channels in the same space. The _different_ characteristics of mpeg4 compared with mpeg2 at the same bandwidith is of course a seperate issue. Subjective, certainly.

 

I'm a bit leary of anyone that thinks styrofoam is spelled "stirophone."

 

And I'm a bit leery of this statement also.

 

Well, I must say that both of you make ekcellent points.

 

I'll sell you mine for a reasonable price. Send me a PM

 

Jeez, so the guy doesn't run Mozilla Firefox with Spell Checker. I've seen far worse typos on the 'net. For example, I've seen "does" in the following sentence, "How does one typo negate the fact that Scott G. gave DIRECTV MPEG 4 PQ a 9.5 on a scale of 1 to 10?", spelled as "dose". BFD, I still knew what the person meant to type give the context of how it was used in the sentence.

Bottomline is it's evidence that the "HD Lite" monicker could very well be a thing of the past when the shift to MPEG-4 is complete.

 

I have my HR10-250 ready to hit eBAY in a few days as well: hope the prices hold for that long...with the balance of the "Protection Plan" from BB with it (29 months) PM if yer interested.
jock

 

...and of course you must give up the Tivo UI to gain access to all this wonderful content.

 

Somehow I knew that one was going to come back and bite me in the butt. I didn't have my dictionary handy and couldn't recall the exact spelling, but I did run spell check and it liked it so I went with it. So much for trying to be witty.