PrimeDTV PHD-101 / PHD-200 / PHD-205 / PHD-205LE ATSC/QAM Tuner Official Thread

Ok, my curiosity got the better of me today and I ordered the PHD-101. Total cost with shipping was $179.70. The unit says it does ATSC and QAM, but it also mentions here and there NTSC. It'll be interesting to see if it does NTSC or not. I also plan to open it up and I'll post pics when I get it. I'll compare it to my current LG LST-4200a and my Sylvania SRZ3000.

www.epvision.com
www.epboard.com
www.primedtv.com

My unit should be here on Monday, so I'll have my thoughts posted then.

Well, I got the unit today and so far it is average for a box, with things I like and things I don't like. For the OTA part, I think it is a good ATSC only tuner.

The only thing that I don't really like about it is that the autoscan has to find the channel for the unit to tune to that channel. Once it finds channels, you can then add or remove the channels from the channel list. There is a neat button, "List", that will bring up a list off all avaliable channels and you can just select the one you want. You are able to tune to a channel or a specific sub-channel.

The EPG only brings up the current channel with no guide screen for all channels. The remote seems to be the exact remote that is used with the Hisense tuner, except for different colors, etc. Channel changing speed seems to be quite quick.

For the QAM part, I am not so impressed. The first time scanning through my channels, it picked up over 320 channels. Most of those are encrypted, are my music choice or other audio only channels, and are the neighbors OnDemand movies. On this first scan, it did not pick up the 3 clear QAM channels I do get. So I think ok, maybe something is wrong so I reconnect my 4200a and it is working fine. So i rescan with the PHD box and it finds the channels this time. One quirk with the QAM side is that you cannot tune to a specific sub channel, only a main channel. This means that to listen to sub-channel 28 of my music choice channel, I have to punch in 63 (my music choice channel), then channel down 28 times to get to that channel. What a pain. This box will automatically add all the encrypted channels to the lineup, so I manually have to go back in and delete them. The 4200a would automatically not show those channels in the lineup. Another thing I don't like about the QAM tuner is that it takes forever to do a channel scan, and it doesn't save a channel list for QAM and ATSC. So for me, when I switch between cable and air, it takes forever, whereas the 4200a just switches the channel listings it is using.

All of that may seem harsh, but since it has usb, most of those problems are in the software which should be upgradable via the usb.

I mainly got it as an ATSC box for an LCD I'm planning on buying, and needed an ATSC box with DVI. I'm quite happy with the ATSC part of the box, with the one minor problem of having to have the channel in the lineup prior to being able to tune to that channel.

I'll post more thoughts as I use the box.

I've come across some other little quirks, but don't really affect me to much.

The first is when you use the aspect button to change the aspect of SD material to Cinema mode, and then change to an HD channel, the HD channel is streched vertically just a slight bit. By pressing aspect again, restores the HD pic to correct proportions. This only happens in the Cinema aspect, Normal, Full, and Zoom do not affect an HD picture.

The other problem is that when you select 480i output, the screen size is still set at 16:9 with no aspect control for HD programs. When hooked to an analog TV, HD pictures are shown in a 4:3 window, streched vertically. Since I wont be hooking the unit to an analog TV, this doesn't affect me.

Yes, it goes all the way to 135. You also have the choice of STD, IRC, and HRC for the cable band. I'm going to test out their customer support and email them about some of the problems. It seems like most all the usability flaws could be fixed via a firmware update. If so, this box could be a really good performer.

Sorry for the broken picture links. I'm currently switching from MS IIS to Suse/Apache so most of my web content isn't working right now. I'll have them back up in a day or so.

Well, I hooked up the unit via an optical cable today, but found out that there is no sound via the optical port. I emailed them about that and the other glitches I found. I stated that if they cannot be fixed, I'll have to return the unit. Hopefully, I'll hear back soon.

Well, by looking around the epboard site, it looks like they are more into the oem market, which could be a good thing. I think that it might be easier to get into contact with the actual engineers with a company like this, whereas a company like LG or Samsung, you gotta go through stupid sales reps. Since photawn got an email response in one day, hopefully I do to. I emailed the design link instead of the sales link.

As far as the optical out goes, there is defnitely a red light shining out of the port, but just no sound. That tells me that the port itself is working, but that it isn't sending out anything useful.

I haven't even tried. I've got a learning Philips that will probably work it after I program it, but I haven't tried any of the precoded codes. I don't want to loose all my 4200a learned buttons just yet.

Thats what I thought. It looks like most of it is handled in the chip in the center. It does have 2 chips of Samsung RAM for a total of 64MB of RAM. Pretty soon, they'll probably be able to get all the processing on a chip the same size as the actual tuner.

I'll give that a whirl, but if that works, then I would still need to return it, since I'm not going to get a new audio receiver (although I really want one that can do dts and dplII).

Well, I got an email response today. Here is my original email:


and their response:

Well so far so good