Samsung SIR-T451 High Definition Terrestrial Tuner
Terribly engineered. This tuner was slapped together.
This tuner is terrible. It does tune 8VSB and QAM ATSC HDTV channels, but the user interface is awful: <br /> <br />1. The user interface freezes up all the time, especially when tuning to a channel without a signal or a channel that's encrypted. You can't change the channel or do anything while it's trying to tune the channel, which takes 4-7 seconds. You don't even know if your button presses have been registered. <br /> <br />2. This makes it excruitating to try to delete a bunch of channels from the memory list -- each one takes about 10 seconds to delete. <br /> <br />3. The memory list is all screwed up anyway. Navigating to a channel (e.g., typing 93 on the remote, or hitting \\"up\\" when in the add/del menu) ADDS IT TO THE MEMORY, even if it's encrypted or broken. Sometimes it also adds all sub-channels, which take 10 seconds EACH to delete. Who thought this was a good idea? <br /> <br />4. The thing crashes and reboots frequently when channel surfing -- about once every 30-40 channel-changes. <br /> <br />5. Sometimes it gets stuck in a reboot-loop where a particular channel (say 82) makes it crash and reboot, and then when it comes back up it crashes and reboots again, over and over. You have to either pull the plug (which seems to fix it) or change the channel in the tiny time-window when it's booting up before it crashes. <br /> <br />6. It doesn't tune NTSC channels. Seems like this would have cost them less than $5. <br /> <br />7. The aspect ratio settings are screwed up. Amazingly, it doesn't let you letterbox 16:9 HDTV for display on a 4:3 RGB monitor! The \\"letterbox\\" choice is there but grayed out. <br /> <br />8. When displaying a 16:9 HDTV channel on a 4:3 display, the tuner does letterbox the image, but the bars it uses on the top and bottom are gray (instead of black). <br /> <br />9. The tuner does a bad job downsampling 720p, 1080i and 1080p images to a 480i display. Lots of aliasing and twittering. <br /> <br />10. There's no way to navigate toa particular subchannel (like 85-3) from the remote control. There's no \\"-\\" button on the remote control. <br /> <br />11. Sometimes fragments of little dialog boxes (\\"Digital Sound\\") stay up on the screen, obscuring the picture, after the dialog box disappears. <br /> <br />12. Sometimes the dialog boxes stop disappearing by themselves and you have to pull the plug to make them start again.