Tom Barry wrote: > I briefly owned a USDTV receiver last week that I bought on > impulse at > the Walmart a couple blocks away for $199. While it had some > issues and > I returned it I think it still performed as well as all my > various PCHD > cards. But was disappointing when compared to my expecations of it > being a "fourth generation" chip. No matter what "generation" they claim, it's not as good as the so-called 5th gen Zenith or the so-called 4th gen Lynx. Boxes with those components won't be out until next Christmas and beyond. I believe that the USDTV boxes use so-called 4th gen Motorola, but I'm not positive. Cliff reported good things about this generation of Motorola tuner compared with his older tuner, but that's not to say it's as advanced as the newest ones. As far as I know, nothing prior to the Lynx was capable of symmetric echo tolerance, in ATSC tuners. Nor did any older tuners demonstrate an obvious capability to make constructive use of echo energy (i.e. achieve reception with C/(N+I) margins of less than 15 dB). The Lynx managed to do this, in the lab, for two of the three Brazil profiles that include loud echoes. And it managed solid reception with Brazil E, at just under 25 dB of C/(N+I) *with* reacquisition. That means, it managed to reaquire symbol sync, not just to track an existing signal that was temporarily degraded. I don't think anything came close to that before. > But in any event, that $199 is not a sale price, is generally > available, > and has to be considered the new low end STB comparison price now. However we slice it, stand-alone STBs costing under $300 have existed since last Christmas. *Therefore*, it makes no sense to insist that built-in tuners must cost $300 today, much less years from now. As Kon says, it's a rip. And the cost of the newest tuners is no higher than the the cost of these older ones. Bert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.