I dunno about you but me and tapes, if I don't watch it, I end up losing it or needing the space for something else. And I have loads of tapes to sort through, some of them with five and half hours of junk and a half-hour of treasure stuck in the middle. I could always copy them onto a tape all-together, but the quality could be vastly degraded because I record in EP/SLP. It's so much easier to scroll through the DVR and find what you need as oppose to shifting through tapes. And it's so easy to program. It's a relief to be free of the headache of programming a VCR and I'm one of those people who can actually program a VCR. If I want to transfer anything to a tape later, I can do that, too. I've had it for less than a month, and I highly recommend it.