PRODUCT REVIEW: MARCH 13, 2008
Digital Stream DTX9900 and
GE 22730 Digital TV Converters
Here are two more contenders for your $40 NTIA converter box coupons.
It’s almost mid-March, and the long-awaited NTIA-compatible digital TV converter boxes are making their way onto store shelves. After I reviewed Zenith’s DTT900 back in early January, things were pretty quiet until my coupons showed up last week.
I promptly drove over to the local Radio Shack and redeemed one of them with the purchase of Digital Stream Technology’s DTX9900 converter box ($59.95). And just a couple of days ago, Jasco Products, a licensee of General Electric, sent over two new GE DTV converter boxes — models #22729 ($69.99, equipped with a Smart Antenna interface) and #22730 ($59.99, basic model).
After demonstrating both boxes at the Philadelphia Chapter SMPTE meeting on March 11, I decided to test the DTX9900 and 22730 head-to-head with identical signal feeds. The higher-priced 22729 will have to wait until its companion Smart Antenna shows up for a separate review of the combination.
These receivers are just two of the 51 now certified eligible for NTIA coupons as of March 12, 2008. (For an updated list, go to https://www.ntiadtv.gov/cecb_list.cfm). Their designs couldn’t be more different, but their connectivity and basic feature sets are very similar. (Both models are manufactured in China, by the way.)
Figure 1. Digital Stream’s DTX9900 DTV converter doesn’t impress much with its build quality.
OUT OF THE BOX
Digital Stream’s DTX9900 has a somewhat “cheap” look and feel to it, with a plastic, translucent dark gray front plate and a gunmetal gray housing. The front panel only has two indicators – one for power, and one to show IR remote activity. The top of the housing has a master power button and channel up/down buttons.
The rear panel sports two ‘F’ connectors for the antenna input and a TV output connection for viewing down-converted DTV programs on channels 3 or 4, selected by a slide switch. A composite video jack and two RCA jacks for stereo audio round out the connector complement.
The supplied remote control for the DTX9900 has an odd beveled-edge design and perhaps a few too many buttons, but it does give you direct access to important functions. There are two power buttons (one can be used to control your older TV), plus a big blue Menu button with left/right and up/down navigation controls and another big blue button marked OK.
Four large buttons surround the "OK" button and activate electronic program guide, favorite channels, cycle between current and previous channels, and navigate backwards through menus. A translucent Info button, located between the volume and channel up/down controls, gives you an instant snapshot of each station's PSIP data, including its call sign, virtual channel, caption info, aspect ratio, and program format.
In addition to a numeric keypad for channel entry, there’s also a dedicated Meter button to show signal strength, a Mute button, an Audio button to select secondary audio programs when present, a four-step image zoom/aspect ratio control, and a closed captions menu.
Figure 2. GE’s 22730 DTV converter has a rather unusual case design.
GE’s model 22730 DTV converter box has a strange, but futuristic design. The top cover slopes up from each end and is concave in the middle — like one of those beds that conform to your body shape. It has a more substantial feel to it (2.2 pounds to the DTX9900’s .9 pounds) and the entire finish is gunmetal gray, including the front panel which has standby and power on indicators (redundant, maybe), a power on/off button, and channel up and down buttons.
Like the Digital Stream box, the 22730 includes two F connectors on the rear panel for the DTV antenna input and RF output to channel 3 or 4, with the selector switch alongside. Composite video and stereo audio connectors round out the back panel. (The model 22729 adds a “smart antenna” connection that resembles an off-center RJ45 jack.)
The supplied remote control is not as well laid out as the DTX9900. It has too many buttons that are the same size, with only four (Recall, Signal, Zoom, and Mute) in different colors. The Menu button is in a group of four at the bottom and hard to spot, sitting between the Exit and Subtitle buttons. To the right of them is the button for program guide.
“What’s Subtitle mean?” you’re probably asking. Well, it’s actually the closed caption button, and if you think that’s confusing, the Menu button is used to enter and exit menus completely, but the Exit button just backs up through the converter box’ menus. An equally small button marked Info gives you that instant snapshot of PSIP (good luck finding this button in the dark), while an Audio button is used for secondary audio programs.
The Zoom button is actually the aspect ratio control. Your choices here are Anamorphic (stretching 4:3 to fit a 16:9 screen), Zoom (enlarges letterboxed images), 14:9, and 16:9 (converts a 16:9 image to fit the width of a 4:3 screen)
MENU FUNCTIONS
All of the tuners listed on the NTIA site must comply with the NTIA specifications for digital TV converter boxes. That said; it appears that manufacturers have different approaches to meeting those specifications, and in some cases they’ve even embellished their products unnecessarily.
The DTX9900 menu structure is pretty straightforward. The first menu is where you will perform a channel scan, edit your list of channels, check out signal strength, and view electronic program guide data. One quirk of the DTX9900 is that its channel menu includes a setting for Air or Cable reception. This setting is superfluous, as there are no cable TV systems sending 8VSB signals through their plant (and no, this converter box doesn’t receive QAM, either).
One nice feature of the channel scan menu is that you can re-scan for channels you may have missed without erasing previously scanned channels from memory. Not too many dedicated set-top boxes included this function in the past, the notable exceptions being LG ATSC receivers. It’s a nice touch.
The Captions menu lets you turn captions non and off, select the service you want, and customize caption font sizes, colors, font styles, and translucence, not to mention background colors. The Rating menu is where you’ll create and enter a PIN to determine which program ratings to block and pass (assuming DTV stations are actually sending out those ratings).
The last menu is where you set your time zone and choose whether daylight savings time is in effect or not. All NTIA converter boxes must be “green” and come with programmable timers to shut down automatically after a certain number of hours. The factory default is four hours, but you can switch it off if desired.
Figures 3a-b. The on-screen displays for station information on the
DTX9900 (top) and GE 22730 (bottom)
The GE 22730 menu is vastly different. If anything, it’s light on functions, and one of the submenus has a title only an engineer could love — “Apps.” It’s the first menu you’ll run into after the Installation program has been run and is where you’ll find both the “simple” (short) and full-length electronic program guides for all channels. (You can select which will launch from the remote.)
The Channel menu gives you two options — an automatic channel scan, or manual channel scan. That’s it! No channel editing, nor channel tables where you can set up your favorites. The Setup menu is where you’ll select your screen size, cycling between Full, Center, and Letterbox. Center gives you a crop of a 16:9 image to fill your 4:3 screen, while Full gives you the width of that image, but squeezed vertically. Letterbox restores the correct proportions of a widescreen image on a 4:3 screen.
You’ll find additional tweaks in the Setup menu for on-screen display language, second audio programs (if available), and that “green” auto shutdown mode that NTIA requires in all converter boxes. Once again, the default setting is 4 hours, but you can defeat it. This menu also has the parental controls options and ratings lockouts.
The last sub-menu under Setup controls captions (on/off, font size, color, and translucency, and background colors). Here also is where you’ll set your time zone for automatic clock updates from digital TV stations broadcasting System Timetable (STT) information — assuming they have it right to begin with.
Figures 4a-b. Digital Stream’s menu (top) features a cable input mode (???),
while GE’s menu (bottom) starts off with “Apps.”
PERFORMANCE
There’s not a lot to test with these boxes. I connected both through a two-way splitter into one of my house RF systems, fed by a rooftop antenna. Next, I started an automatic channel scan and clocked how long it took each box to tune in, identify, and save all available ATSC channels.
The Digital Stream box is pretty fast at scanning channels, although not the speed demon the Zenith DTT900 is. The DTX9900 completed a channel scan in 2:20, showing each group of major and minor channels as it came across an active ATSC channel. Of the available local stations, it picked up all but two (WMCN and WNJT) that were at odd angles to my Channel Master model 4308 suburban UHF yagi.
The GE 22730 is a relative tortoise compared to the DTX9900. It took 5:08 to scan all active channels, also showing each group of major and minor channels as they were decoded. Instead of displaying the physical channel being scanned, however, the 22730 instead shows the actual frequency (like 771.000 MHz, instead of CH 64). That would mean nothing to the average viewer; only an engineer or hard-core enthusiast would understand the correlation.
As I mentioned earlier, the DTX9900 lets you view all channels in your map and edit them as you wish, also defining favorite channels. The GE 22730 has no such functionality — each time you initiate an automatic channel scan, you wipe out your channel tables completely. The only way to get around this is to scan for channels individually in the Manual Scan menu, scrolling through each possible channel one at a time until activity is found. (And you still won’t see a map of saved channels!)
Figures 5a-b. Video quality from the DTX9900 (top) is quite a bit better
than that from the GE 22730 (bottom).
In terms of video quality, I did see a difference in picture sharpness between the two boxes, with the DTX9900 coming out on top. Figures 5a and 5b show enlargements of the CBS3 “bug” from KYW-DT, as displayed on a JVC 24-inch LCD broadcast monitor.
Look for aliased (stair-stepped) edges around the CBS eye — they’re quite evident on the GE 22730, but largely eliminated on the DTX9900. If you plan to watch digital TV programs on an older, larger analog TV set (32 or 36 inches), you will definitely notice the difference in picture quality.
As far as RF sensitivity goes, I’d call it a tie. Both stations were equally adept at locking up Philadelphia, Allentown, and Trenton DTV stations with moderate to strong multipath and compared favorably with the Zenith box. My last test involved using a precision attenuator to see how low I could cut signal levels from WTXF-DT (FOX) before I saw picture breakup and the audio dropped out. In this test, the DTX9900 was about 1 dB better than the GE 22730, which was essentially a tie.
CONCLUSIONS
Both of these converter boxes satisfy the NTIA requirements, but there is a substantial difference in performance between them. The DTX9900 gets my nod on the basis of its user-friendly menu with extra features like a channel edit function and overlay scan. Plus, it has a much better design for its remote control.
The GE 22730 is more substantially built, but why does it need two power indicators? The quality of its converted video leaves something to be desired, particularly if you are watching on a large analog TV. And its remote is too dense and hard to use, particularly the Exit, Menu, and Subtitle buttons.
