Video Asylum

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Notes on the transition to digital TV

Posted by tunenut on June 23, 2008 at 13:37:18:
I know most people here will have satellite or cable...but I've never been all that interested. Concerned about the upcoming loss of my old analog TV signal, I got a Zenith digital converter box, as discussed a little below. Price after $40 coupon was $25.

Initial experience was awful. I plugged in the box and at least half the channels were gone. Analog signals that were weak were noisy and snowy. Digital signals that were weak were just a black screen with a No Signal indicator.

After a week of antenna games (I have rabbit ears upstairs, a long coax coming down), it was still impossible to get all channels reliably. So with no great expectations, I tried getting a Philips amplified antenna. Unpacking carefully, so that I could take it back as necessary, I replaced the upstairs rabbit ears with new amplified rabbit ears. It worked. The higher I set the amplification, the better it worked. I set it to the full 50 dB. After tweaking location and orientation, I got all the OTA stations in LA. It's proven to be reliable. Three stations can still get flaky sometimes, depending on atmosphere I guess. But most of the time, they are all there.

YMMV. An indoor antenna setup is totally site specific. I think amplification worked for me because I have to drive a long coax. The antenna was only $32, so no big risk before hassling with an outdoor antenna.

Against all my expectations, I am loving digital TV. I thought it was some scam to give the public low quality signals, similar to satellite radio. But the picture is clearly superior (pun intended) to my old analog signal. Without snow or ghosts, every station looks now the way only 1 station looked on analog, clean and clear. The most telling indicator is that I have not been tempted once to return to analog.

The big loss in this transition has been programmability in my VCR. It is an analog tuner, of course, so I can no longer set timer and station and have it pick up shows when I'm gone. I can leave the converter box on a station and have the VCR record at a given time, but this is a poor substitute for the full programmability.

It is obvious that I will eventually need to get a video recorder (probably DVD) that has a digital tuner, so that I can re-establish the ability to program recording. Other than that, digital TV has been good.