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Old 30-Apr-2014, 7:02 PM   #10
Vanr
Junior Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2011
Posts: 4
OTA Tuners

1st I believe that OTA viewers are such a minority that the ability to tune in both weak & strong signals AND a have a nice user interface are not important to the TV manufacturer because it is very seldom used. Today most TV tuners are built with a chip (search google for “TV Tuner Chip Set”), these chips dictate the ability to bring in weaker signals and not be overloaded with strong signals, but as I mentioned I believe TV manufacturers are not interested in offering the best TV tuner on the market because almost no one cares.

I also recently purchased a Samsung smart TV, I found the guide to be as good as most of the DTV converter boxes, I believe (?) the TV matches channels in the guide to the channels that the tuner was capable of tuning in, in some of my DTV boxes the user can manually add channels if they know what frequency they are being transmitted on.
My problem with Samsung’s implementation of the guide is that my Samsung TV has to re-download the guide every ≈1.5 hours instead of downloading it only one time each day like all of my DTV converter boxes. If I’m watching a show and want to see what’s on next during the last few minutes of the current show I should be able to view the guide, but when I do this the current TV shows is frozen for 20 to 30 seconds while the guide is downloaded again, this results in missing something important at the end of the show I am watching.

I expect and welcome the day when TVs do not have a tuner built into them, this will result in a new market for tuner components (like a DTV converter box), maybe then the quality and feature set of the tuner will get better. Actually there are a few OTA tuner boxes on the market today, many of them allow you to record specific channels to a hard drive, some of them require a monthly subscription to get the guide.
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