My poor VCR. It's a Panasonic "pro" model that I bought at a discount ($250) from my former employer, the National Sports Daily, which had gone out of business and was auctioning off its assets. The VCR served me well enough through the '90s, but when I got my hands on a DVD player almost four years ago, the VCR dropped a notch in my A/V rack. When I hooked up a Philips TiVo unit a year later, I really started giving the VCR the cold shoulder. Now? Well, it's sitting in an unmarked tech grave in the back of my closet, not far from my Newton MessagePad. It's been usurped by a new device that promises to make VCRs an endangered species: the DVD recorder.

Sayonara, VCR
For the uninitiated, standalone DVD recorders look a lot like your average DVD player, except they tend to weigh more. (Don't confuse them with the drive variety that you put in your desktop computer or attach externally via FireWire.) I've been playing around with Panasonic's DMR-E20, which carries a list price of $999 but actually sells for closer to $700 online. Pioneer offers the DVR-7000, but it's a high-end piece--about $1,500 online. Philips just hit the market with a less-than-$1,000 model, the DVDR1000. In the near future, the features and performance of these products will bulk up as their price tags shrink closer to mass-market-friendly levels of about $350. And there are more on the way. In other words, they'll follow a path similar to that of their CD-burning cousins.

Though standalone recorders are more expensive than DVD-R drives, the advantage to having one is that it ties right into a TV or TiVo. Hard-drive-based recorders powered by either TiVo or Replay TV have always lacked archival abilities; that is, you can't get content onto static media. True, you can output programs to your VCR, but who wants to deal with monstrous videocassettes that degrade over time once you've tasted DVD?

My Six Feet Under six-disc set
For the hell of it, or maybe just to impress my friends, I've been taping episodes of Six Feet Under onto my TiVo's drive, then transferring them onto DVD-R discs. Today, those discs cost around $5 each but are gradually falling in price as CD-R media have done. The recorded results are quite good, though I wish my cable signal were a little cleaner.

If you want, skip TiVo and record straight from your TV to various media, including rewritable DVD-RAM and DVD-RW (some recorders, such as the Philips, record to a slightly different format called DVD+R or DVD+RW), and later, insert chapter marks that allow you to move through the disc just as you would with a DVD, eliminating the commercials, of course. With players that have a built-in FireWire connection, such as the Philips and Pioneer units (Panasonic's DMR-E20 lacks this key feature), you can make near-perfect DVD transfers from the home movies you create on your digital camcorder.

Toshiba's hybrid
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the ideal deck would be a TiVo-like device with a built-in hard drive and an integrated DVD recorder. How sweet would that be? Good news, video enthusiasts. At its line show in Los Angeles last week, Toshiba introduced the RD-X2, which, according to press materials, "combines the benefits of DVD-RAM and DVD-R recording with the time-shifting and assembly editing capabilities of an 80GB Hard Disc Drive (HDD)." Just what the doctor ordered. The problem? Well, this bad boy carries a list price of $1,499 and employs Gemstar VCR+ technology, rather than the more robust and user-friendly TiVo or Replay TV tech.

Again, this is a quickly evolving category, so it's only a matter of time before we see a DVD recorder integrated with TiVo, plus simpler, more affordable models that mimic traditional VCRs and use cheap, rerecordable media, whether it be DVD-RW or DVD+RW. Until then, I'll keep borrowing review units and making my own season series compilations. Can you say Sopranos box set?