Dish Duo Dvr By coupon_girl on May 07, 2009 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

This DVR has it all, a dual tuner to support two different televisions, HD programming on your primary television and SD programming on both, 55 hrs of HD storage and over 350 hours of SD storage. The model is black and a bit chunky, but that's expected and the remotes are virtually identical to the previous SD dual tuner remote.

I love having the benefit of a dual tuner being able to access and record on two separate televisions without an additional receiver or the additional receiver charge. You are still not able to record a program on a tv while watching a different program on that same tv however you have the ability from the primary tv to set recordings on the secondary. We have the dual tuner set to run our great room as primary and our master bedroom as secondary (off of this we spilt to the rec room downstairs). Very rarely do we ever have conflicts where 3 tv programs are required to be watched or recorded at the same time. If we know we are recording two programs at once that the kids can't watch (Tuesday nights NBC's Biggest Loser and TNT's Trust Me) we just pop in a DVD for the kids or watch an already prercorded show on the DVR and all is peaceful once again.

The menu is fairly easy to navigate but expansive. I try to take as may short cuts as possible. I like to group my programming together to access it easier, and I use the "*" feature to search as opposed to navigating through the menu.

Currently I only have two complaints. The first is more of an installation issue. Apparently when installed the remotes for all Dish Network customers are set the same. Because of this we have had problems with neighbors switching channels and ending recordings on our device. This makes my daughter extremely upset when her Curious George is replaced by ESPN however I'm sure the guy watching ESPN isn't so thrilled that he keeps getting switched to a monkey and a man with a yellow hat. We've had to switch twice now but I think we are good to go.

The second complaint is the noise. For anyone who has ever lived in an apartment I'll tell you this machine sounds as if your neighbors are running their vacuums. At night I can here it running from the bedroom and when watching programming on the tv you have to turn it up just to drown out the humming noise. All in all I'm not disappointed it's a good product, I'm just wondering what the draw is going to be on my electricity.