When Apple and I spent October with my family in Michigan, I was introduced to my dad’s new high-def A/V setup, the centerpiece of which is a Sony Bravia II 46″ LCD television. They get digital cable service from Bright House Networks, and my dad gave me a tour of the HD DVR he’d just ordered. It does its job adequately, but since both my parents, Apple and I are big-time TiVo fans, there was plenty to complain about — and my dad took me on a tour of those complaints.

Coming from a TiVo, there’s a lot of hair-pulling when you “downgrade” to the cable company’s Motorola-based DVR. But inwardly, I found myself chuckling a bit — because the user interface issues with Motorola boxes are nothing compared to the litany of bad design decisions at the core of our Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 DVRs down here in Florida.

Our area is one of the roughly 10% of Comcast’s national infrastructure that is built on Scientific Atlanta equipment, rather than Motorola equipment. While the hardware itself is much more powerful and versatile than most of Motorola’s offerings, you’d never know it — because the horrible SARA operating system we’re stuck with makes the act of watching and recording TV so detestable that sometimes you’d rather just go read a book. Comcast boasts that they’ve got such a better product than TiVo, but really, the only thing better is the fact that you can get a free replacement box if it ever breaks down (since you’re only leasing the equipment).

This past week, our DVR screwed us big time. Our favorite — and only — sit-com we watch, The Big Bang Theory, had been accumulating for a couple of weeks, so for our Thanksgiving dinner, we decided to watch them. During the first episode, the screen inexplicably went black about two minutes in and never recovered. DVR’s fault? Who knows. The second episode, from this past Monday, did not record. I looked at the box’s “Scheduled Recordings” list, and Monday’s episode was still on the list, even though it was now Thursday. Does it make sense that a program that already aired would ever be on a list of upcoming recordings?

So instead, we decided to watch an episode of CSI: Las Vegas that I recorded from CBS HD. It was a good episode, but unfortunately, the ending was completely missing. I guess the show ran overtime by a couple of minutes. A TiVo would have been smart enough to know this, and compensate accordingly. The SciAtl 8300 only compensates if you tell it to. Of course, you can’t “tell it to” on a show-by-show basis — if you have a season pass, you can add extra minutes to every show or none at all.

Which reminds me — you can’t tell it to not record a single show of a season pass, because it will delete the whole season pass. Which in turn reminds me, the 8300 only gets the next six days worth of scheduled programs, and has no ability to search for programs to record, making it all but useless. Let’s say you watch a show on Monday, decide you like it, and go into your 8300’s setup to create a season pass for that show. If it’s a weekly show, you can’t do that until at least 24 hours later — because the show you just watched is off the grid, the box’s schedule only goes up till next Sunday, and there’s no way to schedule a recording unless it’s showing on the grid!

But let’s say you get lucky, and you know a show you want to record is going to be on, sometime, within the next six days. Only you don’t know when, or on what channel. Do you think the SciAtl 8300 would let you search for a show by name? Hell, no. You must find the show yourself on the schedule grid, or — and pardon my giggling — find it in an alphabetical (by title) list of every program on every channel over the next week. As my boss (who has the same DVR) complained, God help you if you want to look in the alpha list for a program that starts with “P,” because you’ll first have to scroll manually through about six thousand pages of “Paid Programming!”

Add to this the fact that the grid (and all other UI screens) look like those old computerized community bulletin board channels from the 1980s, and the fact that if you stop watching a recorded show it’s impossible to resume from where you left off, and you will find yourself astonished at just how miserable the high definition TV experience can really be. Thanks, Comcast.

As we speak, Comcast is rolling out TiVo-based software upgrades — for an additional $3 a month, of course — to its customers in New England. Soon, TiVo software will be an optional upgrade on all Comcast DVRs — wait for it — in Motorola service areas. That’s right. They haven’t quite managed to get the TiVo upgrade to work on Scientific Atlanta hardware yet, although Comcast promises it’s coming…eventually.

Whatever. Today, I finally broke down and added a TiVo HD unit to my Amazon wish list. This obviously doesn’t guarantee that I’ll get one, but we’ve hesitated to even wish for a high-def TiVo until now — because getting one would mean paying TiVo’s monthly fee, as well as paying Comcast’s monthly fee for two CableCARDs to make the damn thing work.

But when you can’t even trust the $12/month DVR you’re already paying for to do something as simple as record a TV show, you have to wonder…wouldn’t it all be worth it?