Samsung SIR-T165 HDTV Terrestrial Receiver Review

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(More customer reviews)This is currently the top-of-the-line product in its category (HDTV receivers). It has three capabilities of interest:
(1) reception of digital over-the-air television broadcasts
(2) scaling of VCR, DVD, satellite, or cable signals to either HDTV 720p or 1080i
(3) FireWire output and recording control to D-VHS VCR
The first capability (reception) is well-implemented. The receiver was able to pick up all the digital channels in my area (not to mention the legacy analog channels) through its auto-detection capability, and provided a channel list editor to allow me to knock out the channels I didn't want, such as analog channels that duplicated digital channels, home shopping channels, and analog channels where the reception was too poor to be of interest. For the digital channels, it also includes a signal strength meter, which is useful for finding the best antenna position and angle. Overall, as a digital broadcast receiver, I found nothing to fault in this product. Before buying, however, you should do research to determine what digital channels are currently available in your area. The web site ...is excellent for this purpose, showing not only what channels are available, but also those that are scheduled for future availability, and finally the signal direction and strength. It may seem strange to go back to over-the-air reception, especially after satellite and cable have made picture quality such a selling point, but digital over-the-air television, even for non-HDTV programming, has better picture and sound quality than cable or satellite (including digital cable and satellite - both over-compress their signals to squeeze in more channels and degrade picture quality), and its free. As for the HDTV programming, well, its just the best quality picture available - much better than even DVD
The second capability (scaling) is an attractive bonus capability. The receiver can scale from 480i, 480p, 720p, or 1080i to either 720p or 1080i, the two standard HDTV resolutions, and output them to either RGB, component, or DVI. What's interesting about this is that it can do it not only for the broadcasts it receives, but for video signals from other sources such as VCR's, DVD's, satellite, or cable, through either compositve, S-Video, or component inputs. The quality of the scaler is quite good; by running my other sources through the receiver, I get better picture quality for all of them than I did by running them directly to the television. For 4:3 source material, it supports full (for anamorphic sources) conversion, zoom ( for letterbox sources) conversion, and letterbox (centered with sidebars). My only gripe is that the sidebars it adds are gray. Now for some types of televisions (CRT, plasma) gray bars are useful for avoiding picture burn-in (uneven where to the display). But for other types of televisions (LCD, DLP) burn in is not an issue and gray bars serve no purpose. The receiver should have included an option to replace the gray bars with black. That said, for me the scaler alone would have justified the price.
The third capability, D-VHS recording control, works, but just barely. There are quite a few issues here: (1) FireWire recording ties up the device; you can't watch one program while recording another, which precludes use of the scaler while recording. (2) The timed recording feature does not support repeated events - it can't be programmed to record every Tuesday at 10:00; it has to be re-set for each individual recording, (3) the timed recording feature only works if the receiver is turned off - if the receiver is accidently left on, the recording will fail, (4) the timer depends on the time broadcast by the stations themselves - it can't be set manually - and many stations do not bother to broadcast the correct time (I have been trying to get the stations in my area to fix their time broadcasts, and have had some success). With regard to compatibility, I have the JVC HM-DH3000L D-VHS deck and have not had any inter-operability problems. Over the FireWire connection I could control, record, and play back digital video and audio successfully and without loss of picture quality.
Product ease of use varies with the features used. The reception capability is pretty simple. Anyone who can hook up a VCR or cable box to their television should be able to hook this up to their television. The scaler capability is a little harder to use, but probably within the reach of a lot of people. The D-VHS recording capability is not particularly easy to get working; unless you are into home theater, you shouldn't try it; there are just too many limitations in the current generation of hardware.

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