Well, as I played around with my new 622 last night, I was pleasently surprised to hit no bugs to speak of. I'm in the Phoenix DMA, but nowhere near any HD OTA signals, so I was seeing network HD for the first time. Too bad it's summer, and the few network shows I actually bother to watch are in reruns or off the air completely. But I took a look at the nearly identical crime shows CBS-5 and NBC-12 were running and they looked pretty good. Fox-10 was showing a Rob Schneider movie that looked GREAT, but I started to feel ill after a few minutes, like my brain functions were shutting down. The first snag was that ABC-15 was in black, and remains out this morning. (World Cup is on...I bet they're getting a lot of complaints.) The SD version is up though. When I called to activate, the recording said "I see you have a service outage in your area", so I assume that's what they were talking about.
Which brings me to my first compliment/complaint. I like the fact that I am automatically routed to the HD channel- means less explaining to my wife. (I'm also glad they will be doing this with HBO, Showtime, ect in the future). But it would be nice if the feature would revert to the SD version if the HD is not available. This could especially be important for DVR events...if I had set the DVR to record the World Cup game this morning, I'd rather have the SD version than a blank screen.
Anyway, everything else looked great, and I'm glad everything works the same as my 942....EXCEPT for the DVR button. It's bad enough they haven't come up with a one-button solution for Closed Captioning, now they take away one-button DVR access? Grrrr. They could make it a whole lot better if the menu would default to "My Recordings", but instead it defaults to "cancel". I'm not sure I see the point of the on demand feature anyway. I can record any one of 20 movies on a PPV channel and keep it indefinately, or I can watch one of 4 "on demand" movies (2 of which I've never heard of) that go away in 24 hours no matter what.
Now, to the DVR itself. I set it to record Craig Ferguson on CBS-5 last night just for the heck of it. I had never watched him before, but I heard an interview with him on NPR, so I thought I'd give it a shot. This morning, I woke up to three separate recordings...one 40 minutes, one 3 minutes, and one 16 minutes. As far as I could tell, I hadn't had any power outages, so I was puzzled. AND...each recording was blank!. Mostly black, some with grey rolling bars.
Now hopefully, this was related to the ABC-15 outage in some way, but this morning, CBS-5 was up, and ABC-15 is still down. So I hope I don't have a bad box. Need to run more tests.
I decided to check the HDMI output, which never worked right on my 942. Hey, this one doesn't work at all! Oh well, I'm used to it...and when the HDMI actually did work on the 942, the analog componant output always looked better to my eyes anyway.
I was pleased that I could use my 942s UHF remote along with the new one with a little reprogramming. Now I can leave one in the bedroom and one in my home office. I haven't decided what to do with my 942...I may sell it without the UHF remote.
As far as locals go, I was surprised to see that NBC-12 does some kind of PARTIAL stretch on SD programming, with narrow blue bars on the side. The stretch was minor enough that it didn't really bother me. (By comparison, I find TNT-HD unwatchable most of the time due to stretch-o-vision.) The other two locals used 4:3 with black bars, as they should. I've still yet to see ABC-15.
So, definately not as good as my 942 feature and quality wise, but the new programming outweighs the minor problems.
Which brings me to my first compliment/complaint. I like the fact that I am automatically routed to the HD channel- means less explaining to my wife. (I'm also glad they will be doing this with HBO, Showtime, ect in the future). But it would be nice if the feature would revert to the SD version if the HD is not available. This could especially be important for DVR events...if I had set the DVR to record the World Cup game this morning, I'd rather have the SD version than a blank screen.
Anyway, everything else looked great, and I'm glad everything works the same as my 942....EXCEPT for the DVR button. It's bad enough they haven't come up with a one-button solution for Closed Captioning, now they take away one-button DVR access? Grrrr. They could make it a whole lot better if the menu would default to "My Recordings", but instead it defaults to "cancel". I'm not sure I see the point of the on demand feature anyway. I can record any one of 20 movies on a PPV channel and keep it indefinately, or I can watch one of 4 "on demand" movies (2 of which I've never heard of) that go away in 24 hours no matter what.
Now, to the DVR itself. I set it to record Craig Ferguson on CBS-5 last night just for the heck of it. I had never watched him before, but I heard an interview with him on NPR, so I thought I'd give it a shot. This morning, I woke up to three separate recordings...one 40 minutes, one 3 minutes, and one 16 minutes. As far as I could tell, I hadn't had any power outages, so I was puzzled. AND...each recording was blank!. Mostly black, some with grey rolling bars.
Now hopefully, this was related to the ABC-15 outage in some way, but this morning, CBS-5 was up, and ABC-15 is still down. So I hope I don't have a bad box. Need to run more tests.
I decided to check the HDMI output, which never worked right on my 942. Hey, this one doesn't work at all! Oh well, I'm used to it...and when the HDMI actually did work on the 942, the analog componant output always looked better to my eyes anyway.
I was pleased that I could use my 942s UHF remote along with the new one with a little reprogramming. Now I can leave one in the bedroom and one in my home office. I haven't decided what to do with my 942...I may sell it without the UHF remote.
As far as locals go, I was surprised to see that NBC-12 does some kind of PARTIAL stretch on SD programming, with narrow blue bars on the side. The stretch was minor enough that it didn't really bother me. (By comparison, I find TNT-HD unwatchable most of the time due to stretch-o-vision.) The other two locals used 4:3 with black bars, as they should. I've still yet to see ABC-15.
So, definately not as good as my 942 feature and quality wise, but the new programming outweighs the minor problems.
