[morphadaz]

I'm wondering about this unit. As the manual states that it does take cable and QAM, as well as OTA...does it allow you to use both sorces at the same time? If not, is it a PITA to switch between them? How does the guide work in this regard?


Much love to any 3410A owners that can enlighten me on this one.


thanks...

 

[ekb]

I can comment on the 3510A and I assume that they would work the same way. Switching between OTA and cable (which is QAM almost always) is a PITA. Besides only having one RF input and hence the need for an external switcher, the STB does NOT remember any of the scanned channels. Hence you need to rescan every time you switch. The good news is that the scan is fast - a couple of minutes vs 45 minutes for my Sony TV. You cannot get a guide on cable since that would require a cable card which the 3510A/3410A do not have.


Ed

 

[morphadaz]

Thanks Ed. The reason I'm really wondering, is the the 3410 has two inputs, one cable and one antenna. I was hoping that it wouldn't be as bad as the 3510. Hmmmm.

 

[ekb]

That is significantly different then. Maybe you'll be OK.

Ed

 

[jimg]

The 3410a has two inputs... one for off-air and one for cable (unsrambled QAM).


It can handle both flavors of digital, but for analog you have to choose either OTA or cable.

(I have mine set to use cable for the SD channels. )

For HD, it uses OTA and cable: channel with a subchannel (e.g. "2-1") is the OTA flavor, while cable uses 70-x and up. Unfortunately the 3410a doesn't have cable card support so I'm limited to only the unscrambled QAM channels.

 

[ddz]

Morphadaz,

The 3410A works seamlessly between the 2 inputs. After scanning in all available OTA and cable channels, you can scroll up thru the standard cable channels first then it automatically switches over to the OTA ATSC channels and then back to the QAM cable channels. I don't have a VHF antenna hooked up to my OTA input, just a Silver Sensor UHF, so I don't know what it does with OTA NTSC channels.

The guide is TVGOS which is being built into many of the newer sets. It works in mysterious ways as you may gather from the many posts in these forums about TVGOS. It is supposed to pull in guide info from either OTA or cable channels in the area. Many people have complained about it not working in their newer TVs but I don't recall any complaints from 3410A users.

For more info than you could ever want, look in the HDTV Recorders & Players forum for the 3410A thread that spans about 1.5 years. It is still active today.

 

[Rammitinski]

Morphadaz - The Sony DHG-HDD250/500 DVR/Tuners accept cable cards and integrate all sources together when channel changing and in the guide (TVGOS). And unless LG's upgraded the tuner chip in the newest batch, the Sony has the newer 4th gen. tuner chip (LG originally had 3rd). There was some mentioning in the 3410a thread that the newer model's tuner seemed to perform better than the older's. The Sony's have just been closed out and are discounted by a few hundred bucks, and they seem to be going pretty fast. There is a long thread on these models here, too, if you're interested.