About 73% of the country is watching cable TV these days. And as HDTV has caught on with this crowd, so have digital cable boxes that include TiVo-like hard-disk recorders for high-def programming. But these boxes, built almost exclusively by either Scientific-Atlanta or Motorola, have drawbacks: limited capacity, a less-than-elegant user interface, and, of course, a monthly lease.

Now Sony is taking on these cable giants with a CableCARD-ready super DVR offering greater capacity and more sophisticated features. Boasting half a terabyte of storage on two 250-gigabyte (GB) hard drives, the DHG-HDD500 should be an HDTV junkie’s dream. It holds at least 60 hours of high-def programs — three times the capacity of high-def DVRs currently available from your cable company — letting you record an entire season of two of your favorite series in high-def without having to delete episodes. And if you love watching movies with Dolby Digital 5.1 sound on the high-def channels of HBO, Showtime, Starz, Cinemax, HDNet Movies, and others, the HDD500 can keep 30 of them at your fingertips. Given how much better movies look in high-def, the HDD500 could relocate your DVD player to the closet. (Sony also offers the similar DHG-HDD250 for $800 with a 250-GB drive.)

What We Think

Thoughtful features and massive storage can’t overcome a clunky program guide.

Other empowering features you don’t typically get from cable-leased boxes include the ability to receive and record analog and digital channels off the air (with the addition of an antenna), pause live TV for up to 90 minutes, zap a 5-minute block of commercials or a boring talk show guest with a single button push, and mark chapters so you can precisely quarantine blocks of commercials without having to scan through them. A universal remote and TV Guide On Screen — a free interactive guide for finding or recording programs — complete the package.

SETUP A CableCARD module supplied by your local cable provider lets the Sony receive premium and high-definition channels without an additional box (though it won’t allow you to access a video-on-demand service). The monthly fee to rent a CableCARD varies by provider, but Time Warner in New York City charges me $1.75 a month vs. $8 to rent an HDTV-capable box with a 160-GB integrated DVR. Though you’d think that installing this PC Card-size device would be as simple as sliding a Wi-Fi card into a notebook computer, you have to schedule a visit with the cable guy so he can hand deliver the card (in my case, a Scientific-Atlanta PowerKEY), pop it into the HDD500’s back panel, and activate service.

An RF-style antenna input for capturing off-air broadcasts and the cable connector are the only source inputs. You have a choice of component-video or HDMI outputs to your HDTV, and there’s an optical digital audio output for sound.

Once the service was turned on, the Sony’s auto setup found some 400 channels on my system. But CableCARD devices won’t display your cable system’s interactive program guide. To get grid-style program listings on the HDD500, you enter your Zip code and wait for the TV Guide On Screen database to load overnight.

I did encounter one unexpected problem during setup. The HDD500 turned out to be sensitive to a 2.4-GHz RF transmitter that the SkipJam iMedia Center — a couple of shelves away on our rack — uses to communicate with its remote (click to see review). Most of the channels below Number 50 — the most popular ones — exhibited severe blocking in which large parts of the picture pixelized and froze up along with continuous audio dropouts. Our regular box, a Scientific-Atlanta Explorer 8300HD, was completely immune to this interference when placed in exactly the same position as the HDD500. A 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi trans-mitter in an adjoining room caused no interference problems.

The SkipJam is FCC-approved for radio transmission, further suggesting an issue with the Sony. So we plugged in a 2.4-GHz cordless phone. Sure enough, the HDD500 exhibited the same picture and sound problems on the same channels whenever the phone’s base was within about 6 feet of it. Two separate samples of the Sony showed the same behavior. Sony is aware of the problem and says it is working to correct it. If you encounter this issue, the company will fix it under normal warranty procedures.

PERFORMANCE Once the source of interference was removed, every channel looked as good as my cable system delivered, whether buffered “live” or recorded. A San Francisco Giants game recorded from the InHD channel was particularly pristine. The Sony’s four-speed slow motion allowed me to keep my eye on the ball no matter how fast the play. Surround sound effects such as gunfire on CSI: Miami were especially startling. Switching live channels between the HDD500 recorder and the Scientific-Atlanta box, I was unable to discern any difference in video or audio quality.

The Short Form

SONYSTYLE.COM / 877-865-7669 / $1,000 / 17 x 3.25 x 14 inches

Plus

•Huge storage capacity. •Adjustable commercial skip. •Chapter markers. •Four-speed slow motion.

Minus

•Only one tuner. •TV Guide On Screen.

Key Features

•500-GB capacity for recording 60 hours of HDTV or 400 hours of standard TV •CableCARD slot •TV Guide On Screen for searching listings and setting recordings •Live TV can be paused for up to 90 minutes •Dolby Digital 5.1 via optical digital output •Chapter marking in live and recorded programs

One of the features on the HDD500 that I like is the ability to mark favorite points in both live and recorded programs. These bookmarks can be placed anywhere. Then you can use the Next or Prev button on the remote to jump to the closest mark. In a recording of Late Night, I put a chapter mark 50 minutes into the show as Conan O’Brien held up Duran Duran’s new CD, allowing me to replay the rock group’s performance without scanning through the program. If you record an ad-infested program, placing a mark at the end of each commercial block lets you leapfrog directly to the next program segment.

The Advance button comes set for a useless 5-second skip, but you can change it to 30, 60, or even 300 seconds to get past long commercial blocks. And I liked the adjustable buffer for pausing live TV up to 90 minutes. As for the uncluttered infrared remote, its best feature is the central scroll bar. Roll your thumb over it, and the highlight bar on screen moves up or down; press and hold it to select an option.

Unfortunately, none of these features make up for getting stuck with TV Guide On Screen, which has a number of inherent flaws that Sony, and apparently other manufacturers, have decided to live with. First, this box and all the TVs we’ve tested that use it load the channels into the guide in arbitrary order that bares no relationship to the cable system’s channel order. A TV Guide On Screen spokesman said the channels were listed in the order of popularity, though it’s funny how Fox always seemed to be at or near the top. (Fox and TV Guide are owned by the same company.) You can manually reorder the lineup yourself, but with hundreds of channels to rearrange, that’s a huge pain.

Next, two advertising panels appear every time you call up the grid, leaving room for only a very small picture window. And the guide, at least in the HDD500, was clumsy to use when I tried to do simple things like moving ahead several days to check program listings. As for doing a search by title, you can enter only the first letter of a show, which produces hundreds of listings.

TV Guide aside, my biggest gripe is that the HDD500 has only one tuner at a time when the major cable companies are offering two-tuner boxes such as the Scientific-Atlanta 8300HD or the Motorola DCT6412. With only one tuner, you can’t record two high-def programs at once. If you’ve lived with two tuners, you know that’s a big drawback. To be fair, part of the fault rests with the first generation of CableCARD modules, which don’t support simultaneous tuning of two channels. But it puts the HDD500 at a strong disadvantage.

BOTTOM LINE Sony included some great features in the HDD500, including awesome storage capacity, a handful of very convenient viewing options, and excellent picture and sound quality. But its reliance on TV Guide On Screen, rather than a proprietary guide (or even a paid service like TiVo), the lack of a second tuner, and the $1,000 price tag makes it a hard sell compared with the $8 or so a month it costs to lease a box from your local cable provider. Sony has to be admired for trying, and I was really rooting for this product to succeed. But in this first generation, anyway, the HDD500 isn’t likely to break the cable companies’ set-top box monopoly.