Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 DVR

Company: Scientific Atlanta (but only available if your cable company offers it)

Platform: Your cable TV

Suggested Retail Price (SRP): service US$9.95/month

Street Price: n/a

Battery Juice Rating: 1/2

Special Awards: none


For the uninitiated, a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) is like a smart VCR that uses an internal hard drive instead of videotape. A DVR lets you do things like record an entire season's worth of a TV series, jump immediately from one saved show to another, instantly erase saved recordings and fast-forward or rewind at high speeds.

You've probably heard of TiVo, the best-known and most popular DVR on the market. Perhaps you're one of the small number of people who've been considering a TiVo, but are tempted by a DVR offered by your local cable company. The features sound similar, and the monthly fee is about the same or slightly less than TiVo, so what's the difference?

This was my reasoning when my provider, Time Warner Cable, began offering its own DVR, Scientific Atlanta's Explorer 8000. The features sounded impressive:

-Interactive program guide
-Series management
-Picture-in-picture
-Control live TV
-Create manual recordings
-Record/watch 2 shows at once

According to Scientific Atlanta, the unit's 80GB hard drive will hold about 50 hours of programming. In the first of many unfortunate design decisions, there's no way to tell how much space is actually left on the hard drive. Your old saved shows just start disappearing. If you've protected everything, the DVR just stops recording with no warning.

Some of these features don't work as expected, or are too difficult to use. For example, the series management feature that lets you record only the first occurrence of each episode isn't available when you initially set up the recording. You have to set up the recording first, navigate to the series screen, select the show, and then access the option. How poor is a design that fills the limited hard drive with multiple copies of the exact same show by default?

When you finish watching a recording or stop it in the middle, you have the option to save or erase it. The two buttons that do this are right next to each other, and it's very easy to hit the wrong one accidentally. If you do, there's no warning that you're about to delete it. You screwed up, and now your show is gone. Deal with it.

Sometimes the Explorer 8000 simply stops working. Often when I finish watching a recording, I get a blank screen. This can be fixed by flipping channels, but it shouldn't have to be fixed; it shouldn't happen, ever.

Speaking of things that shouldn't ever happen, sometimes the unit simply freezes in the middle of some operation and reboots itself. When this happens -- and it will, once or twice a week -- you'll be treated to the 2-to-4-minute boot sequence. This is where you find out that Pioneer is to blame for the DVR's Passport Echo operating system. You can't watch TV while this is happening, and you will be cursing Scientific Atlanta and Pioneer the entire time.

The absolute, fatal flaw is the Explorer 8000's utter lack of responsiveness. There's no onscreen or audio feedback when you push a button on the remote, and the DVR usually takes a few seconds to respond, so you frequently end up pushing the same button twice in a row. The most-used feature is the onscreen program guide. So what you often see is the program guide flashing onscreen for a fraction of a second, then instantly vanishing as a result of the second button push.

The program guide's "View by Title" screen is just as bad. There are hundreds of entries for each letter of the alphabet, and God help you if you want to see a listing that's not right at the beginning or end of the list, because there are only two scrolling speeds available: Way Too Slow and I Want To Kill Myself.

More than anything, Scientific Atlanta's Explorer 8000 is a study in bad design courtesy of Pioneer's operating system. It is a shining example of how potentially great features can be ruined by bad software, and the importance of a well-designed, responsive user interface.

-Andrew Sasaki 9/7/04

Andrew Sasaki -[Monday, September 06, 2004]
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