Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

UPDATE 10/19/15: This product has failed and has been thrown in the trash. For the last month, my reception has slowly deteriorated. Thinking it was the indoor HDTV antenna I was using, I decided to purchased and install an outside antenna with a preamp. I wired this to my house cable wiring and it works great! Except for the TV where the Mediasonic HW180STB is installed. That TV receives signals terribly pixelated. I then direct wired the line to the TV, bypassing the Mediasonic, then tuned the Samsung flat screen. All my channels are back! It's the Mediasonic tuner that's the problem. So I've reduced this review to four stars. It's a good box, as long as it's running properly. ------------------------------------ ORIGINAL REVIEW Having been locked in the cable and satellite television market for years, I've been accustom to using a rented box to receive my television stations. We recently "cut the cord" and ditched our cable TV, which freed up about $800 a year in television bills. In the process, we purchased this box as a way to receive local over-the-air (OTA) content. It's been since I was a child, in the 1970s, that I last pulled stations in using an antenna. Boy, has this process changed, and for the better! No more staticy, ghosty signals that constantly require adjusting the "rabbit ears" to pull the signal in well. After much research, I chose the Mediasonic HW180STB HomeWorx digital converter. This little box grabs signals from your antenna, converts the analog signal to its digital constituent, then passes this processed signal to your television or home theater receiver for viewing. The advantage of using this converter, for us, is it unlocks Dolby Digital 5.1 over an HDMI line to our home theater receiver. Our television doesn't have an HDMI return channel feature to pass the audio from the television back to the receiver, so if we didn't have this box, we'd forever have to use the television's internal tuner and speaker, leaving our surround sound unused. After receiving the converter, I set up this little box in a matter of minutes. It was really simple! All I did was plug in the HDMI cable from our old cable box into the HDMI out on the back of the converter. This cable runs to our home theater receiver, but it could also go directly to our television. I then plugged the antenna in and plugged the convert into an AC outlet--done! When this was complete, I powered it up. After the box booted, I pressed the Menu button. From there, it's very easy to locate the Antenna Tune function from the onscreen GUI. A total OTA tune took only a few minutes, and this tuner found 28 channels in our modest, local market. The first thing I noticed was how rich and sharp the 1080i stations are. Cable and satellite stations utilize a compression algorithm to reduce bandwidth. The compression used is lossy and produces a "softer" image than OTA images. Using this box, you get uncompressed OTA digital stations. I found the OTA 1080i images to be really stunning! They contain sharper detail than their cable/satellite counterparts. After you've completed a tune, you can press the extended programing guide button to see what's on each channel. Unlike cable and satellite tuners, you don't get an overall guide showing everything on every channel. Rather, you get the schedule for what's on the station you're currently watching. This information is encoded into the digital OTA signal. Using the tuner in my Samsung television, I wasn't able to view the channel programming guide. That's a nice feature that the Mediasonic digital converter provides that is really handy. If you want to view cable stations, the Mediasonic HW180STB also supports tuning to your cable provider's cable line. This tuning process takes quite a bit longer. I left the room and came back in five or ten minutes. It also isn't as feature rich as your cable provider's cable box. You won't have a fancy program guide, for example. We cancelled our cable service, but I connected the cable line and performed a cable tune to see if I could grab anything off our cancelled service. Sure enough, I was able to tune all our local stations and a few cable stations. Unfortunately, the tuner also grabbed 167 scrambled stations, and the watchable channels it grabbed were mixed into these, making it very difficult to easily locate the channels I could watch. There was also no programming guide for each local channel. In addition to this, the local channel 1080i quality was inferior to the OTA content, so I wouldn't recommend viewing your local content this way. Using an OTA antenna is really the way to go, if you can do it. The Mediasonic converter can act as a DVR. Mediasonic refers to their DVR function as PVR. The PVR feature records programs either by pressing record while viewing a program or scheduling a program to be recorded at a later time. Unlike many DVRs, you cannot watch one channel while recording another. Programs can be recorded to either a USB thumb drive (up to 64GB) or an external USB hard drive (up to 2TB). Experimenting with the PVR feature, I found using a USB thumb drive to be inconsistent. I have several thumb drives of varying size. Some worked smoothly while others caused pixilation and screen freezing. I found two Verbatim thumb drives, each of the same size, were inconsistent. One worked well while the other failed. This failure could have been due to problems with read/write times to/from the drive chip, or it could be due to a problem that Mediasonic may correct in a later firmware update. There's no way for me to tell. I didn't test further to determine what was causing the inconsistency between each thumb drive. In place of the thumb drive, I purchased a Western Digital Passport 1TB external hard drive. This worked perfectly. Recordings were captured smoothly and effectively. Playback was also excellent. Using a memory device, such as a thumb drive or external hard drive, programs can also be paused and played during general viewing. This is helpful during those times you need to make a quick bathroom pit stop, grab a drink, or attend to something else. Mediasonic calls this their Time Sync feature. As with the PVR feature, pausing and playing a program only works well with properly supported devices. It uses the memory device attached to the box to buffer content when viewing is paused. If the storage device gives you problems when recording, you'll also have problems when pausing. For the money, this is a fine digital converter. It supports a number of very helpful features, allows for HDMI connectivity (not found on all converter boxes), and supports both OTA antenna connectivity and cable/satellite connectivity. Its use really excels for OTA use. If you're in need of a digital converter at a reasonable price, the Mediasonic HW180STB is a nice selection.