Even at its maximum quality setting, which purports itself to be at a "near-DVD" level, the artifacts and dithering are still present, although reduced. In our experience the first two days using the ReplayTV 2020 were days spent getting used to the effect, but after the first week we could no longer see the artifacts without concentrating. It's amazing how humans adapt to almost anything if given enough time. Compounding the reduced visual quality problem is the fact that the ReplayTV 2020 unit is "always on", meaning that even when the device isn't recording anything, the live cable signal is being passed through the MPEG-2 encoding/decoding process before it gets to your eyes.

Again, after a week we were getting used to the ReplayTV 2020's viewing defects, and had to concentrate intently to pick them out if not given a back to back comparison with an identical non-ReplayTV image. In our experience all of the new PDRs suffer from this MPEG-2 artifact condition, it's not isolated to just ReplayTV Inc.

The benefits of the 2020 always being on, even during live broadcasts, are many. First, the ability to pause live television is great. Need to go get a drink of water? How about a bathroom break? Doorbell just ring? Or perhaps the in-laws are on the phone and want to tell you all about their RV trip across the country?

No problem, just hit the pause button on the 2020's remote, and the live television broadcast you're watching instantly pauses mid-stream. Whenever you're done with the distraction, hit un-pause to resume your live program right where you left off. Pretty handy, and as is the norm with the 2020, no strange setup or configuring is needed to get this function up and running. By hitting "pause," you're really hitting "record," as the 2020 goes ahead and begins recording the program you were watching, while pausing the image where recording began. This way users don't miss a trick.

We found ourselves automatically recording almost all of the programs we watched regardless of whether we had to or not, simply because we could then fast forward through annoying commercials almost instantly using the 2020's remote. If a show started at 8:00pm for instance, and was scheduled until 9:00pm, we'd begin recording right at 8:00pm, but start actually watching the show at 8:15. The 2020 lets users watch the program that they're recording at the same time as it's being recorded, so by 9:00pm we'd be back on track after using the 2020's remote to skip the 15 minutes of commercials that are common to 60-minute shows.Lots of cute little tricks like the above are available with these PDRs, they're fantastic at what they do.