I bought one of these 80 GB HDD LSI chip units on Ebay which sell for $100-120 about 3 months ago. It has performed flawlessly on doing what it does best- recording component in to HDD for movies from a set top box that will feed it 480I widescreen, burning a disc or more and finalizing to play on most newer DVD players. You get full 16:9 no bars, if source is so, from HD source and the video quality is great. About a month ago I bought another and it has performed 100% perfect. Polaroid evidently took a lot of the original machines and DID refurbish them to perform. Make sure what you buy has been truly refurbished by Polaroid. If you expect it to do more than what I stated...this is not the thread for that.

HG, do you still use a Pioneer 640 for recording? I understand when recording a wide-screen program through the Polaroid 2001G (component in) it outputs an anamorphic signal via s-video so you can get full wide-screen recordings on a 2nd DVDR, but I'm interested in knowing if recordings done that way handle the widescreen flag properly...ie: will they play back letterboxed on a 4:3 CRT TV, or will they display as anamorphic and everything will look too tall and thin?