Over the course of the weekend I finally got around to hooking up my Magnavox DTV Digital to Analog Converter. The model of this particular converter is TB100MG9 for those interested.

For those that just read the above and said, "What’s that for?", it’s the thing used to receive a digital over-the-air signals for an analog TV. Or to be very specific and quote directly what’s stated on the box, it’s "intended for receiving digital terrestrial broadcasts with an antenna (indoor or outdoor)."

Here’s the good and the bad:

The Good

The setup was fairly straightforward. I hooked up the rabbit ears to the box, then let it perform an auto-scan to get whatever channels it could.

I do get more channels compared to when I did on analog.

All channels have crisp clean images. Digital has no "snow" to speak of.

The color is notably better.

Channels have descriptive text boxes appear on-screen whenever you tune to them – a nice touch.

The Bad

(Bear in mind these complaints have everything to do with the box and box alone.)

I have yet another remote control to deal with. And the remote provided is terrible. Yeah, it works but it’s hard to read, the buttons are tiny and it’s a nuisance to use. Hopefully a universal remote control will take care of this.

The setup menu is absolutely infuriating to work with. It’s just not user friendly. Thankfully you don’t have go there that often.

The way this particular box renders close captioned text is just bad. To put this in perspective, imagine you’re watching a DVD with the spoken dialogue text being displayed on screen. Now imagine that text half its size. That’s what DTV closed captioned text is like on this Magnavox.

The audio for whatever reason is way too quiet when coming from the DTV box. I really have to crank up the volume compared to before.

The aspect ratio does not auto-adjust for standard definition or wide. Yes, you can manually change this option, but wow is it buried in the setup menu. And it’s not obvious where to find it either.

My thoughts and recommendations

I want to say first that yes, it works. Yes, TV looks better compared to before. Yes, you will really like DTV compared to over-the-air analog if that’s what you have.

I will however recommend against use of this particular Magnavox box. I’m sure there are DTV converters far superior to this one with a better menu system, more user friendliness, better remote control and so on. Yes, it will cost you more to get a different converter box, but I honestly think the cash would be well spent.

Again, the make/model I have is the Magnavox TB100MG9. I am uncertain whether this is still a current or discontinued model – but if you see it, I’d steer clear of it, and not because it doesn’t work (because it does work), but because of the complaints I outlined above.

A blog I recommend for everything to do with DTV converter boxes:

http://dtvconverterboxes.blogspot.com/

The Magnavox mentioned here is in there with a review as well as many others such as those made by Tivax, Zenith, Philco, RCA and several others. Definitely worth the read if you’re in the market for one.

One tip I recently became aware of was that unplugging chargers (i.e. cell phones) when not in use can save a good bit of power.

When you think about it, this really makes sense. Because the charger typically has a power converter on it which converts the wall current into what the device needs, whenever the charger is plugged in the current is being converted, regardless of whether the device is on the other end. The end result is power constantly being consumed. This same logic applies to virtually any device which utilizes a charger, laptops for example.

So when your device is fully charged, unplug the charger. Doing so not only saves energy, but can save you some money as well.