CableCard Pros & Cons

Pros
-technically you get a better connection with your cable going direct to the tv instead of through the cable box. Reality is you will most likely never notice the difference.
-your tv may do a better job scaling the picture to your tv than your cable box. Again, will you really notice any difference?
-no box = lower rental fees, cleaner look, etc.

Cons
-No interactive features available at this time through CableCard (i.e. pay per view, movies on demand, channel guide, etc). This may be available at some point in the future with CableCard 2.0 but it won't be backward compatible and very murky as to when 2.0 will arrive and what features will really work.

Get a DVR cable box. A DVR is the only way you can record HD. I have heard that cable cards have some issues that still need to be worked out. I know a few people that work for the local cable company (Brighthouse), and they advised to stay away from cable cards.

Can DVR Cable Boxes record shows on the fly or scheduled like TiVo?

DVR boxes work great. You can record shows on the fly or schedule shows to record just like TiVo. You can watch one thing and record another. Plus it gives you Picture-In-Picture.

Cable Card gives a superior picture to the cable box. Have 4 LCD's with cable card and three are connected to Tivo. Only downside is recording HD. But with digital cable everything looks great on the Tivo.

Superior? I highly doubt that. My picture on my SXRD is flawless through the DVR box. Cable cards have no guide and no recording capability, so I don't see any advantage.

Like I said before... technically you get a better connection with your cable going direct to the tv with the cablecard instead of through the cable box. Reality is you will most likely never notice the difference.

Why not get the one with the cable card capability so you have that option? I don't know a lot about cable card as Comcast doesn't yet offer it in my area but a great deal. I guess we have all gotten used to having some kind of external tuner whether it be a cable box, satellite, HDTV tuner, or Tivo that we all forgot what it was like to actually change channels from our TV. Remember how mad we were when we had to start using the cable boxes and gained yet another remote? The fancy remote we got witht he TV became useless for all but the volume. Anyway, I just believe in future upgradability and cable card seems to be that.

dssxxxx is correct. The cable card DOES give you a better picture. Hard to believe..but I ditched my CC and went back to the digital cable box (component connection) and noticed an immediate difference. I can't say I noticed it on HD channels, only on SD. I didn't have time to compare the DVI/HDMI signal versus the CC.

The reason I ditched the CC was because the built-in TV Guide on my DLP is not 100% reliable. I hated not knowing which channel was which. After looking on several forums, it seems the TV Guide implementation is severly flawed and I wasn't alone.

Cable Card is nice when you wall mount a big LCD and don't want a cable box or have any desire for on-demand programming.
No equipment rental fee either.

Hi everyone: Kinda new and enjoying - getting an education.
what is a cable card?
what are the abbrvs. YMMV & OTOH stand for? seen them on some of the respones on this forum.
Thanks much.