James - you must be having something else going on there - I have 2 HR20s hooked up to Sonys - 1 to a 50E20000 and the 2nd to an XBR3 - both record & play OTA HS & SD perfectly, as well as DirecTV HS and SD channels. One reboot was needec on one unit back in December, and one on the other the first new software update in January. Other than that - no problems at all. Apparently, people are blaming their HR20 just about for any problem, even when there may be other problems in their installation as well. You could have bad HDMI connections, bad cables to the dish, a bad multiswitch, or other things going on, not just a faulty HR20. I'll bet 9 out of 10 people who claim an HR20 problem never check anything else - which explains why some have the same issues over and over even with a replacement. Next thing you know, the HR20 will be responsible for the rain or snow. DUH.

Mitch:

There appears to be 2 sides to your coin in this other piece on the same site. I'm inclined to go with this fellow's assessment....

http://www.tvpredictions.com/radike022307.htm

This is yellow journalism at its worst.

This piece of gross misinformation clearly sounds like it was written by a disgruntled postal worker. It is blatently one-sided and litered with inaccuracies. It is also not based on fact.

For the vast majority of HR20 users, we know better. I can account for a total of 22 units alone in my circle of user associates, none of which has had any problems scheduling, recording, or playing back programming. The HR20 has been solid for most users since it came out last September. A small minority of users have experienced some hiccups, but even some of those have proven to be self-inflicted based on user error, poor equipment connections, and poor cabling. In other cases, they tried to hook up the HR20 to an HDTV which was known to have HDMI problems with any device, and yet the HR20 got blamed.