I think you're unlikely to get anything that would give you the video quality you want that would be both portable and affordable, in a DVR type system. I've certainly not found any high-resolution, pocketable, low-compression systems although I have looked.

The nearest thing would be one of the archos personal DVR units, which are really pretty good. However, they compress the input signal using (I think) mpeg-4, otherwise even the 100GB units would fill up very rapidly indeed!

The lowest-cost and arguably highest-quality option for portable recording is really a miniDV camcorder with video input. The limiting factor here is normally the camera quality and composite video bandwidth, as even a very good external camera isn't usually quite up to the one built into the camcorder. There are exceptions, but they cost more than the camcorder by a significant amount

If you go this route I would advise getting one of the smaller sony units, as they seem to be one of the few on the market where you can record in vcr mode without the requirement of the remote control. The record button is buried three menus down on the touch-screen UI, but at least it's there, which is more than can be said for most consumer camcorders. The sonys have very good recording quality too.

pca