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I've had the Motorola 5100 stb installed about a week ago from Service Electric cable TV here in Pennsylvania (Lehigh Valley). It is hooked up to a Sony 34xbr800 and I must say honestly that I am VERY disappointed with the Motorola box!
Let me start by saying the quality of the HD is excellent. However there are way too many issues with the 5100:
- ALL non HD channels are of very poor quality (and yes that includes the digital channels). My older digital cable box has way better picture quality than the 5100. The 5100 is poor on all of the outputs for non HD: component, s-video, rca or coax. It seems to add noise to the picture and vastly changes the colors and intensities of the signal. You can hook it up on the lesser connections and it appears to look better but dont fool yourself the issues are still there and you are just muting them.
- The sound goes out of sync with the video every so often on any channel. There is no pattern here! Quite maddening.
- The box locks up every so often and takes about 2-3 minutes to get itself working again.
The firmware of my unit was 2.40
All said, I called Service Electric to have them UN-INSTALL the box and re-install my good old, regular digital box. It is just not worth it at this time to watch only a handful of HD programs and suffer thru the issues of the box when 99% of the programming I watch is non HD! Also I dont feel like hooking my cable directly into the TV to watch unscrambled channels as this is a major inconvenience with no onscreen guide.
It is sad that I will be losing the HD signals at this time but until these issues are worked out on the Motorola 5100 or Service Electric uses another stb I will not pay for this kind of quality.
PS: Service Electric (Lehigh Valley, PA) has ESPN HD on Channel 516! Watching the NBA games in Hi-Def was amazing!!!!!!
Let me start by saying the quality of the HD is excellent. However there are way too many issues with the 5100:
- ALL non HD channels are of very poor quality (and yes that includes the digital channels). My older digital cable box has way better picture quality than the 5100. The 5100 is poor on all of the outputs for non HD: component, s-video, rca or coax. It seems to add noise to the picture and vastly changes the colors and intensities of the signal. You can hook it up on the lesser connections and it appears to look better but dont fool yourself the issues are still there and you are just muting them.
- The sound goes out of sync with the video every so often on any channel. There is no pattern here! Quite maddening.
- The box locks up every so often and takes about 2-3 minutes to get itself working again.
The firmware of my unit was 2.40
All said, I called Service Electric to have them UN-INSTALL the box and re-install my good old, regular digital box. It is just not worth it at this time to watch only a handful of HD programs and suffer thru the issues of the box when 99% of the programming I watch is non HD! Also I dont feel like hooking my cable directly into the TV to watch unscrambled channels as this is a major inconvenience with no onscreen guide.
It is sad that I will be losing the HD signals at this time but until these issues are worked out on the Motorola 5100 or Service Electric uses another stb I will not pay for this kind of quality.
PS: Service Electric (Lehigh Valley, PA) has ESPN HD on Channel 516! Watching the NBA games in Hi-Def was amazing!!!!!!
