Living with the unit for a while, I have the following comments to make:

1. The menu screens do not take advantage of the fact that it has high def output. They could have made so much more information appear on any given screen, but instead it looks exactly like a standard def Tivo, with the same number of information lines per screen.

2. The menu screens in fact look like filtered-upconverts of the standard-def screens in the original Tivo. The text looks quite fuzzy compared to, say, my Samsung receiver when it was plugged into the same input on the TV. It makes me think I need to adjust the TV's focus. Fortunately, this is only with the menu screens. The actual HDTV broadcast pictures are as sharp and clear as I would expect.

3. It doesn't seem to always record high-def programs in favor of standard def programs. For example, I noticed it suggestion-taped a movie off of standard-def HBO. Since the movie was on the main HBO channel (not HBO2 for example), I know that there was a high-def version of the movie playing at the exact same time on the high def channel. I wish it would have taped the high def version instead of the standard-def version. There's no place in the software where I can exert influence or control over this.

But on the good side:

Picture is excellent. Even standard-def upconverted-to-1080 pictures are excellent. Allows simple control of aspect ratio for standard-def pictures, and allows gray bars instead of black. Allows you to change the ouput format (1080, 720, 540, 480) from the remote control. Oodles of hard disk space. Works exactly like the standard-def tivo units in every way (ie, really really well).