Hello, new guy here so bear with me.

I just upgraded to HDTV with DirecTv and want to know if this is normal. I'm guessing no.

Whenever I change to an HD channel the screen goes black, after 1 or 2 secs the searching for signal message appears, then the screen resolution and clock appears in the upper left box, then screen goes black again, then the searching for signal message appears again, then the channel tunes in. The hole process takes about 5 secs or so. This only happens when tuning an HD channel and is very annoying.

I have an HR21 connected via hdmi to Samsung HLT5687 LED DLP box.

Do you have a particularly long run between your dish and receiver? Older cable? Might be low voltage getting back to the dish to switch transponder banks.

The first run is long, perhaps 100 ft or more, because it goes up into the central wiring closet and then back to the tv. The second cable, installed when I upgraded is maybe 20 ft long.

Under your video settings, you may want to check and see if Native mode is On or Off; if it's On, turn it Off and see if that helps. If that solves the problem, you will just need to make sure the DVR output is in the correct mode for your display (e.g., 720p, 1080i).

Ross

That fixed it! THanks. Now please explain what native mode is?

It's in the manual. Native mode passes channels at their native resolution to the TV where picking a fixed output mode causes the DVR to scale channels to that resolution. When using Native and you switch between channels with different resolutions the TV needs to resync on them.