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Being a long time 921 user, I thought I would share my experiences with the 622. First off I must say I like the 622 there are a lot of improvements, but some times I feel I am fighting the 622...

1. The built in scaler is 1000x better than the 921. I am constantly zooming, stretching, etc depending on the channel. The partial zoom is nice, but mostly I do full zoom. I never liked the 921 scaler, I always tried to use the one in my TV since the 921 scaler seemed very poor. Now I use the 622 one since it is better than the one in my TV.

2. The OTA HD tuner is far better than the 921 OTA tuner. The locals in my DMA are broadcast with left over Christmas lights... 1-2.5kwatt transmitters. CBS is the only decent one with like 20kwatts. The 921 would sometimes take a minute of the signal bar going up and down to lock in the weak ones. It had a hard time going from 1080i to 720p (i.e. if I was watching 1080i station and tuned a 720p it would take extra long to lock on). The 622 locks on instantly. I would say it is miraculous in comparison. My TV set has built in OTA HD and it never had a problem either, but the 622 is even faster. This gives me much more confidence about getting the OTA channel events.

3. One thing I feel I have to battle is the "smartness" of the recording event timers. With the 921 (and its unreliable OTA) I would record both OTA Lost and satellite Lost at the same time for example to be sure that even if it did not lock in (which it did every now and then) I would still have a backup. Well the 622 does not want to do this. It says the satellite Lost is a duplicate and declines to record it. It is possible to override this behavior but it is a bit buried down in the menus. Perhaps with this super OTA tuner I will gain enough confidence not to have to worry about the duplicates.

4. One of the nice features of setting up an event is you can see if it will record it or not. If it does not want to record it, it will put an X on it in the guide or strike it through in the timers list. This is a bit annoying as mentioned in #3, but also because it is still a bit dumb in other cases. Case in point, I was watching a movie (tuned in the middle), said hmm guess I will record it, hit record. Well then I looked through the guide to see if it repeated, it did. So, I thought may as well get the beginning too, pressed record on that one. Well it automatically refused to record it. Because it had it already being recorded (even though it would not be a full recording). Again I had to go override it. Even stopping the current recording and deleting it was not enough. It actually keeps a list of old timer events, you have to go delete the timer event. Yes I know this keeps it from recording the same show over again.

5. The default behavior when picking a show to record out of the guide and saying you want to have it repeat will cause it to automatically adjust the recording times when it comes one. But, it cannot figure out that reruns on the same channel are not new events and it will record them too. For example I record Smallville on one of the WBs. Well it wants to pick up the rerun WBs even if you tell it new shows only. Apparently it bases new shows on if it has ever recorded that particular episode or not, not guide data.

6. If you decide to just record a block of time manually instead of trying to do shows it does not divide up the block by shows when you go back to watch them like the 921 does. For example I record 5pm - 7pm to get all the news. When you go back to watch this on the 921 you see multi events and you can pick which of the shows you want to watch in the block and jump right to it. On the 622 you just get a block named manual timer and the date/time. Yeah I know the 921 never named them right either, always named it the show that ended right before the block started.

7. The remote for TV 1 is IR. I could not find how to change it to UHF anywhere in the manual without turning off TV 2. Well it is possible. The review of the 622 posted at DBStalk does tell how on page 43. It is nice to have all the outputs active at once and 2 built in UHF modulators to feed back in the signals to other TVs. They really should document in the manual how to do the change, after all what good does it to have a channel out for TV1 for another room if the UHF is IR?

8. The Guide has fewer channels on it at one time. You do have a nice selection of guide formats, but the smallest print one still has fewer channels than the 921.

9. It seems to test the phone line every day. It reboots once a day, and you can adjust the time. The only issue is if you have the TV on at that time it will put a big box up asking if it is OK to reboot and get the guide updates. It was nice to be able to force a 9 day guide update using the menu since it had downloaded the guide before my channels were authorised so it did not have more than the 3 hour guide on my channels. I changed the time to a couple minutes in the future and a couple minutes later it asked if it could shutdown and do the update.

10. When you turn the unit off it really puts it on screen saver. The only real annoyance of this is that it says press select to exit the screen saver when you really need to push the power button again.

11. The menus of course are all rearranged and it takes a bit of experimentation to find them all.

12. The step forward and back frame by frame is different. Single stepping backwards seems to work the same as the 921. It appears to go back to the previous I frame (MPEG compression works by sending a series of frames types I, P, & B. I frames are the complete picture, P frames describe differences between the frame and the previous frame (i.e. this object moved 5 pixes to the right and the rest of the picture stayed the same), B frames describe differences based on the frames before and the frames after, the most complicated of the 3 types of frames to compute). When stepping forward the 921 stepped by P and I frames, the 622 steps by I P and B frames. The MPEG stream may look like IBBPBBPBBPBBPBBI in this case about 15 frames or 1/2 second per I frame. When stepping backwards with both the 921 and 622 you would go back about 1/2 second per step. When you step forward on the 921 you would jump a few frames each time, with the 622 you seem to really step through every frame. It is many more steps going forward with the 622 compared the 921. I think it is an improvement since you can really see everything. Perhaps the next version of the chip set will have a big enough memory buffer that it can construct an entire GOP sequence and will be able to frame by frame backwards too.

13. Pressing pause on the 622 causes it to jump back to the previous I frame. You notice a slight repeat when you press play again.

14. It is marginal for the bedroom. The 921 is way too loud for the bedroom. The 622 with its auto throttle of the fan is quite enough that I can sleep with it. The hard drive seeks are noticeable, but do not bother me too much. But, the timed reboot will throw it to high fan for about 30 seconds. I am trying to figure out if I want to change the time on it or not.

15. When it messes up it reboots right away. Yes there are some bugs, I think they are in OTA and scaling parts of the system right now (i.e. it has rebooted on me a few times when pressing * to change the aspect ratio, and when doing trick plays with OTA). The 921 would lock up and I would have to get up and hold the front panel button for 10 seconds to force a reboot. At least I do not have to get up any more. I have confidence they will eventually work out these bugs.

16. The initial set up has the Canadian DBS satellites 82 and 91 on the point dish. I guess it will not be long before it appears north of the border.

17. It does not ship with any HD cables. It came with a full set of standard definition cables. 1 Svideo, a composite, 2 RG 59 cables (with big red tags saying do not hook up to the satellite inputs), phone line, and a DPP separator which was nice to install with my DPP44.

18. You cannot put in your OTA locals until the unit is authorised. You can have it look for them and it will find them, but you cannot tune them in. I put them in before calling dish. Was unable to access them even though I was getting the free satellite channels (like 101). I called Dish, got my receiver added and then I found out it had deleted all the OTA that I had scanned before. I had to rescan and then it had the channels. The locals did not have guide data, until I forced it to download the guide again as described above. Being able to force the guide download is a nice feature.

19. As usual it took a day to map down the local channels. You have the option to pick Dish HD or OTA HD as the priority (if of course your DMA gets satellite HD locals), also you can decide if you want the standard definition ones remapped too. As an interesting note it put PBS at channel 60 and the WB on a 60+ number too (I cannot remember which one now). My PBS is the one they put in for markets that do not have and the WB is the new one they put in small markets that do not have a local WB. It is nice having these 2 "freebies" mapped down. Of course the other receivers probably do it too.. I never had it in the past since it would block OTA analog locals. (i.e. I get channels OTA that dish does not carry and if you turn on the mapping they go away).

20. The UHF Pro remotes (version 8.0) that I use for my 921 and my 811 had no problem controlling the 622. Having the IR only TV 1 is annoying until you get it working with the UHF remote, but you have to get it all set up before you can switch it.

21. It seems to default to TV 2 in use. I never used TV2, and never put the batteries in the TV 2 remote. But, all during the setup it kept giving warnings that the changes would disrupt the viewing on TV 2. I know the warnings are a nice reminder for the future, just annoying during the initial set up.

22. Working with setting up local channels completely disrupts the satellite operations. What I mean by this is just going to the installation of local channels menu screen will stop all timers that may be running on satellite tuners. There is no warning about this (i.e. a pop up asking if you really want to access this menu and stop all your current timers). I could see perhaps this happening if you go to scan for a new channel or something, but just bringing up the menu is a bit sensitive. Now if you have TV 2 enabled it will give you a warning that TV 2 will be disrupted, but if you have it in single mode there is no warning.

23. Many have reported lip sync issues. I had the issue and played around with the menus and found an audio setup for sync. It was defaulted to HD audio, I changed it to SD audio syncing and have not had a problem with it again. Perhaps another bug to be worked out.

24. I bought this receiver retail. I have decided I will probably do the $99 upgrade of my 921 in April. This unit is so much better (even with the few reboot bugs) than the 921. I am not really happy about the deal, but compared with the 622 the 921 really seems like a boat anchor. I say this now only after 1 day of use... I have timers duplicated right now with the 921 and 622 just in case. I am hoping that the 622 continues to work flawlessly (at least with recording events) and I do not have to fall back on the 921 any more.