THE FRONT LINE: FEBRUARY 17, 2006
In The Blink Of An Eye
Are you in the market for a late-model terrestrial DTV set-top box? Good luck with finding one; they’ve all but disappeared!
Super Bowl XL, NBC’s 2006 Winter Olympics coverage, the Grammy Awards, and the upcoming Oscars and NCAA basketball tournaments all have been or are being broadcast in HDTV. While these events are stimulating sales of HDTV sets, there also appears to be some interest in purchasing dedicated terrestrial DTV (ATSC) set-top tuners to watch the HD broadcasts for free on HD-ready TVs.
Trouble is, retailers aren’t stocking the doggone things these days. Blame it on the widespread introduction of CableCARD and other integrated TVs! Manufacturers would much rather sell customers a complete TV set, even if the buyer never uses the ATSC tuner.
A quick search on the Internet showed only Samsung continuing to support this product category with the SIRT-451, available through big box stores like Best Buy as well as Web retailers. While LG Electronics USA continues to list the LST-3410A, LST-4200A, and LST-3510A models on its Web site, they are out of stock at most retail outlets and apparently discontinued.
Figure 1a/b: Samsung’s SIRT-451 (top) and Humax Digital’s HFA-100 (bottom) are two of the few remaining terrestrial DTV tuners still available at retail.
How about Panasonic? No luck there, the last batches of TU-DST52s are long gone. RCA? There are a couple of Web outlets that still have ATSC11s and ATSC 21s in stock, but they’re not easy to find. Sony? They’re out of that game. Toshiba? Ditto.
As far as off-brands go, Humax is still offering the HFA-100 terrestrial tuner, and you can find it for under $200 with a little shopping around. Circuit City now has the Pro Brand HD3150 Plus for $230. (It’s basically the same product as Radio Shack’s late Accurian receiver, which I found closed out at one local RS store for $69.95 in January.) Problem is; of the 10 Circuit City stores classified as “local” to my zip code, only 3 had it in stock.
It’s a shame that these products haven’t caught on better. NBC’s HD Olympics coverage alone would have justified the expenditure; their camerawork and graphics have really taken full advantage of the 1080i format. Not only that, it appears that more than 50% of the commercials aired have also been in HD, including most of the network TV promos and ads for Budweiser and Chevrolet.
If you have a PC in your media center, you can still pick up HDTV tuner cards — they’re a dime a dozen. I have the ADS Tech Instant HD card (laying around my studio someplace) scheduled for a review, and there are other models out there from VBox, MyHD, and ATI.
But if you watch HDTV the old-fashioned way (meaning without a PC, you geezer), then ATSC set-top boxes are the only way to go. And it looks like they’ll be qualifying for the Endangered Species List pretty soon…
