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There is a lot of good info here. One worthy
source of digital tuners that was missed is that of the newest DVD recorders. The off-air digital tuner is built-in ...but will only record Hi-Def digital shows in slightly lesser DVD quality. Still, it's pretty good, even on large screens (I have a 51 inch monitor in a family room). The point of the rest of my whole
long post, here, is that standard definition digital TV and DVD video's are so good that they are suitable High Definition substitutes ...but they do benefit further from a recent sharper monitor.
An example of a low cost DVD recorder with off-air digital tuner would be the $190 Panasonic DMREZ17K at Walmart: (
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/produ...uct_id=5715955 ).
I don't actually own one of these, but am substituting an even cheaper DVD analog-limited recorder along with an off-air digital tuner box for the time being in a family room. An Olevia LCD HDTV in a bedroom tunes in free locally broadcast HD off cable furnished through a cable with no set-top box. It tunes in the digital channels above the standard 76 analog no-box channels, with NBC-HD,CBS-HD and PBS HD & National purposely showing up in full splendor locally.
I imagine a DVD recorder w/digital tuner may do the same. Off-air network HD makes excellent, very sharp DVD's.
While not quite high definition, standard digital TV directly off my cable box works so well, I was recently able to record crisp medium quality 1 hour each DVD factory tours on the Corvette Z06, Ferrari and BMW. The video undergoes an analog cable transfer in this case, but still works quite well. Using re-recordable DVD discs and editing features, it's easy to make a master so good and commercial-free that, using Nero DVD software (on a regular computer), one can reproduce permanent DVD's that
nearly rival factory sold counterparts. Permanent blank DVD's sell for less than 25 cents each these days and are easy to store. Most DVD recorders will record directly to permanent blank DVD's as well, but the edits may not be effective on other DVD players. I found the one downside to recording digital TV is that the hidden closed captioning did not come through the cable box whereas any TV will find and turn on CC on analog channel recordings, when desired.
With a very ordinary TV, it's also possible to simply watch off-air digital TV through a recorder, record on DVD as one watches at the same time or, in some cases, simultaneously watch the beginning of a show while the rest finishes recording(DVD-RAM). The flaw is that the picture will likely be downgraded to S-video or composite(yellow RCA cable) quality. On an old analog TV set, this won't matter since the picture will still be superior to standard over-the-air analog broadcasts. Programs broadcast in Widescreen even come through in Widescreen whether watching or recording. So older TV's will have bars, top and bottom. Big plus: I have found 2 different football games on the same local off-air network, analog vs digital!
While most of us are familiar with the old VCR-only machine, I haven't seen any with a digital tuner(ATSC), only analog(NTSC). Most only-VCR's offered recently
do not have any tuner as manufacturers struggle with marketing the new digital tuner inclusion requirements. There is a good practical reason for this since the old VCR format, at it's best, produces a grainy picture of lesser quality than some live off-the-air analog broadcasts, while DVD is superior to live off-the-air analog broadcasts(such as The Tonight Show, about 330 lines). DVD's offer exactly double the resolution (sharpness) of the old VCR format, 240 to 480 lines. Note that this now HD-live show, which once used high quality analog cameras, was one of the first to go NBC HD by using excellent HD digital cameras. Non-live re-runs are noticably degraded (network recording loss) on any TV 27 inch or larger. Smaller sets don't easily reveal the poorer picture on re-runs.
Larger screens really bring out the shortcomings of the old VCR tapes. We may cringe at the rapid pace of new technology being offered, but the idea of using DVD recorders is just about a practical necessity for those of us that have already upgraded our TV's to 36 inch or over. A commercial DVD movie looks pretty good on a 51 inch widescreen but an identical-movie VCR tape looks blurry. So buying a DVD recorder with a built-in digital tuner makes sense in that it kills two birds with one stone as a hedge for the future. Except in the case of extremely large screens, I don't think that HiDef disc is going to take off that well meaning that DVD will be around for a long time. As an example, audio has stayed with CD quality ...or even backslid to more lossy MP3, rather than new HD audio formats.
Again, back to the subject of digital TV. I don't have direct satellite TV ...but I do have local cable with a digital package which is taken off satellite, of course, so I'll guess that reception, cable or satellite, is pretty much identical. Since the cable conversion is made digitally, there is no inherent quality loss in this first step. The first 76 channels are merely old analog quality ...but they are reproduced perfectly with digital technology ...along with all their original flaws. The digital channels are noticably improved. The best rival medium quality DVD commercial movie resolution, in practical viewing.
Which brings us back to DVD recorders. I have found some newer DVD recorders will record digital TV, with very little loss in quality, as long as a 1 hour or 2 hour setting is chosen, but not much longer. This is in spite of recordings that may be made using ordinary analog-to-analog connections such as Composite or S-video(a DVD recorder with a digital tuner may record more directly). I don't think any recorders allow true super-high-quality analog Component-to-Component (red, blue, green cable) recordings, nor do they allow digital-to-digital recording such as DVI or HDMI.
For those that might like to low-ball a DVD recorder, Walmart sells another DVD recorder, besides the Panasonic, that works rather well. I found them on sale locally for $50 each because they
do not have a built-in digital tuner and are becoming obsolete. See (
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/produ...uct_id=5027235 ). What makes these Chinese SV2000's so special is that they work better than many more expensive machines ...and they are so cheap at $50 that I bought a couple of spares because even many replacement remotes cost that much. I expect eventual possible remote failure because the buttons are used to repeatedly type in names on the disc's. They also work great for tranfering video to a master disc from older analog video cameras of weddings, graduations etc. Like I mentioned earlier, Nero (part of many new computer packages) will spit out an additional perfect $0.25 DVD copy every few minutes for distribution to relatives etc. I've had no failures in over 100 discs. Some other pluses to this SV2000 player/recorder are that it has a .8x or 1.3x speed play (normal sound pitch) setting that allows clarifying speech(.8x) or watching in a shorter(1.3x) time frame. It also has a 30 second jump-ahead incremental button to fast forward past up to 3 minutes of commercials. It records in all +R, -R or +/-RW formats (but not DVD-RAM). It has a 2 1/2 hour setting that records better than full 3 hour settings(1, 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 6 hr). It sets it's own clock off PBS, if you like. It plays/records excellent picture quality.
One caution: Some low cost Chinese players such as Magnavox are related to an ILO brand player that actually wrecked good discs for me and did not make good copies with Nero. Other Magnavox units may be the same as SV2000 and should be OK.
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