Video Asylum

Posted by DavidLD (A) on February 05, 2011 at 05:45:48

I have a Sony 46" CRT Projection TV purchased in 2005. Its been a rock-solid piece of gear. It was advertized as HD ready, but did not have an HD tuner. At that time lots of TVs were being sold that way. For years I have been thinking about seeing how the TV would perform with a proper tuner. The cable company has wanted to connect one of theor hi end digital HD boxes with hard disk DVR, but I never warmed up to the idea as the deals involved changing phone companies and other dumb stuff.

True stand alone separate HDTV tuners are tough to find. There are only a few DVD writers with tuuners, and tuners have all but disappeared from the VCD/DVD player combo units that lack DVD writing capability.

Anyway, this week I bought a Toshiba DVR670 combo VCR and DVD recorder with a built in tuner that handles NTSC/ATSC and clear QAM signals. We have quite a bit of true HD signal on our cable but you have to pull it off the raw cable before you get to the cable box. The cable company has decided that they want everyone buying cable running a cable box and don't exactly advertize this, but all of their so called basic cable service is clear and unscrambled on the raw cable. I have a raw signal true HD signal feed for the major networks/local channels, WGN, Discovery and WTBS. Unfortunately, getting to these signals while still having access to the scrambled signals involves some complicated cable wiring along with AB switches depending on what I want to watch. Anyhow I have been watching all the HD stuff on a 32 inch Panasonic LCD in my exercise room with excellent picture quality and I was interested in seeing this as well on the older Sony that is HD ready but missing an HD tuner.

To further complicate matters, the Sony has a DVI connector but not an HDMI connector. Years ago I found a 6' conversion cable that is DVI at one end and HDMI at the other. The Toshiba DVR manual says that the highest quality output comes out of the HDMI connection. So, I definitely wanted to try that.

Further complicating things is that the tuner on the Toshiba DVR apparently is not a true HD tuner that sends the HD signal at max resolution directlt to the display screen. It collects the HD signal from the raw cable, but then downscales it so that it can be sent to the VCR part or the DVDwriting part of the DVR. Then since the DVD has upscaling it apparently upscales the downscaled signal again out the HDMI port, while retaining the 16:9 wide screen. Its sort of a "quasi" HD tuner--better than a govt cable box (which is not QAM at all and has only RF or composite video outputs).

There are multiple ways of getting the signal out of the DVR. You can wire it as an RF (antenna input) device, composite video, component video or HDMI. All of these appear to work regardless of whether it is the tuner signal, the VCR signal or the DVD signal

Anyhow, right now I am running the signal out the HDMI port through my cord that converts that signal to DVI for the Sony input. Since DVI unlike HDMI is video only, I have to run separate audio cables. But the pair of audio inputs on the Sony are directly below the DVI input. And not only that, the Toshiba has a pair of separate audio outputs that appear perfect audio sources.

Even more interesting, I can CHOOSE the scaling I want to send out the HDMI connector on the DVR, 480p,720p, 1080i or 1080p. the DVR manual says that if the display device cant handle a particular upscaling that the screen will go blank. I have always known that the Sony could do 720p or 1080i but not 1080p. Sure enough, as I try these the one that goes blank is 1080p.

How is the picture? Well the tuner generates a significantly better picture than the non HDTV cable box. I can't see much difference based on whether the HDMI is set at 480p, 720p or 1080i, but I;m still researching that part. Its a true HD signal in that it is 16:9 not distorted like the cheap converter boxes do running 16:9. The clarity is not quite the equal of my 32" Panasonic LCD set running true HD directly from the raw cable, but its the best I have seen from this set.

I read that its the content providers that really don't want people making DVDs from cable content for permanent storage. We could have true HD tuners that write to Blu Ray, as in Japan, but the content providers have worked hard to make sure this digital copying doesn't happen. The cable providers let you write to hard disk but dont like the idea of moving any of the stuff that is stored to DVD. For that matter they would just as soon you would not make a VHS tape either. People tend to think that VHS is an inferior product to a DVD, but that was because we were used to making copies of often less than perfect analog signals. But a VHS tape at high speed (SP mode) fed by a cable that only got coverted to analog at the cable box is writing a very good signal, and should be put on a DVD that is close to what a true digital copy would be. Granted there is another step (or two) here, in that the signal gets converted from digital to analog in the cable box, stored analog on the VHS, then back to digital on the DVD recorder. Or I can write direct to the DVD from the raw digital cable using the Toshiba, assuming it's a signal from one of the unscrambled channels. How exactly all this works is going to only be determined by a series of experimants over the coming weeks.


I know many of you remain fans of the late generation wide-screen CRT- based projection TVs rather than the current LCD/LED/Plasma flat panels, and the ATSC/QAM tuner brings new life to these. The other option equipment wise that avoids the cable company DVR is a Magnavox unit that combines a 500 gb hard disk and DVD writer, but lacks the VHS. I have old VHC C from my camera tapes I'm going to try transfering to DVD.

Stay tuned..there is a lot of stuff here. So far so good.
What I hoped would work, has worked, so far.


David