Rating: - Great reception and great interface
I'm using this in a fairly rural area South of Greensboro, NC with only rabbit ears. My reception is coming in beautifully and I'm getting just about every digital station offered in the area.
Rating: - Good product but beware if you have a Sony TV
This problem has been reported by others: certain models of Sony TV (mine is a KLVS23A10) will not accept HDMI input from this box, and will display the picture in black and white. From others' reports, both Sony and Samsung claim that their implementation of HDMI is fully compliant, but clearly at least one of them is wrong, and neither company will do anything about it.
I originally thought my unit was defective and returned it only to find that the replacement behaved the same way. I started checking around and found that others had the same problem. It works fine on the component inputs, though, so I kept it. But this can be a limitation if you need the component inputs for something else.
One minor complaint is that the guide memory seems to be limited - scrolling up and down in the guide seems to require frequent reloading delays. Another minor problem is that it won't automatically switch aspect ratio when changing channels, but one button on the remote easily switches this.
A note on the QAM (digital cable) capability: my cable provider (Comcast) doesn't send any program guide data (because they have their own proprietary guide system when using their box), and the channel numbers don't correlate with anything, either. And of course the number of channels sent in clear QAM isn't the full lineup. And Comcast occasionally moves channels around to add to the fun. Since, in principle, the only thing you're saving with this box if you get cable is the modest digital box rental fee, I wouldn't recommend it just for that purpose. But it does work fine.
Otherwise, the picture quality is fine (if you're switching from analog, you'll be very pleased).
Rating: - Pay more, get more
This device costs a great deal more than the government subsidized desk top boxes that are now coming on the market. Those boxes appear to be RF in and RF out, which is the least good way (but the cheapest) to get the new HD channels into an older TV. If you have a newer TV that will accept HDMI or component or composite or S-Video input, this unit will provide a much better picture. This unit also has separate analog (for stereo) and optical digital (for 5.1 channel) sound outputs. It was recommended to me by the chief engineer of one of the local TV stations and is what he uses both at the station and at home.
Rating: - I got really lucky!
I have a 33 inch Panasonic TV that I bought not too long ago at all; I'm not ready for a new TV. To my pleasant surprise I found that it has a Component Video input (Y Pb Pr) on Video 1!! I wasn't thinking hard enough about what a pain it would have been not to have the OSD show up when I bought this box. If you have a TV or a monitor with either an HDMI or a Component input, this is what you want. I can't find any other disadvantages at all (other than the price)! It has an amazing picture, a lot of features, a video mode for anything they can broadcast, and, above all, a very nice tuner. With an outdoor antenna, a cheap amplifier, and not even an antenna rotor, it got 30 DTV channels during the channel scan, which also worked great! We got 12 analog channels before that. The remote, once you master it, is really nice and full-featured, too. I am giving it 5 stars IN SPITE of the price; that's how much I like it. Like people wrote, it takes awhile (10-15 seconds?) to turn on. So what?
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