I think it's much better to have extra tuners than not enough. With the extra ones, if you don't use them, fine, but for many it really enhance the viewing experiences and saves a lot of aggravation. For example: you have 2 tuners and like many of us want to record 3 programs from locals in prime time, you're just out of luck because they don't repeat like a lot of the cable/sat channels do. Also, they networks play their games with extending shows by a minute or starting a minute earlier, tying up a tuner and causing us to miss either the end of one show or the start of the other (although they seem to have let up on that lately). Also, in my market the stations are allowed to start their shows 1 minute earlier (mountain time areas), but the only local that chooses to do so is CBS, again causing overlap problems.
I'm a college football nut and record and watch as many games as I can each weekend. With the way they schedule the games and the length of games nowadays, they always overrun their alloted time and with only 2 tuners I've missed then end of a number of games the last few years, especially the SEC games which all seem to run extremely long. I could have solved some of it by getting another DVR, but that was an extra expense that I don't have with the HR34.
So, if you don't need it, no loss, but I for one am delighted with it and intend to put the 5 tuners to full use come this fall. Almost forgot, it may be important for the summer olympics also that will be spread over a lot of channels.
