I have been looking for an HDTV for a while and really wanted an LCD for the following reasons:
- No burn in issues
- No glare
- Lower power consumption
- Panel does not loose luminance over time
However there have been drawbacks to LCD:
- Viewing angle
- Slow refresh rates on high action frames
- Black level
- Price
Sony seems to have addressed all of these issues with their KDLxxXBR2 series LCD HD TVs and last December the price was in my range. I purchased the 46" version. To date I have been very happy with the set. With the purchase of this HD TV I needed to upgrade my Directv service. After negotiating a free DVR, installation and one year of free DVR service, I scheduled the installation for March 19th, nearly 2 months after calling. After not showing up on the 19th, the Directv installer was able to show up with his supervisor on the 20th. They looked at my backyard full of grown tulip poplar and decided there was no way for me to receive the Directv HD signal This is due to the fact that the pointing angle of the oval HD dish would be to low to clear the top of the trees. I currently have a round dish which clears the trees fine for the 101 degree position of the Standard Definition satellites. Although I am not happy, the installation supervisor's diagram and explanation seem to make sense. My only current alternative for HD service is an off air antenna or Comcast. Verizon FIOS is being installed on my street but I don't see it being active before May or June. I am lucky to receive all the local station off air HD signals with my old attic mounted VHF/UHF antenna. I have seen complaints about the Sony ATSC tuner but I am pretty impressed given the low tech setup I have. However off air leaves out HBO and we love those HBO series, so I head down to the Comcast office.
I was surprised to see that Comcast had a DVR with HDMI output, the Scientific Atlanta 8300HD. I left the office with one. Within 24 hours the service seemed operational, but within another 24 hours the DVR was displaying a message that I was not authorized. After calling Comcast they dispatched a technician who told me that it was a problem with an account setting and they could have fixed it over the phone. He called and got the account problem resolved.
I was very happy the find out the 8300HD recognizes theThecus eSATA drive enclosure with 2 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA drives in a RAID 0 configuration giving me one Terabyte of storage. I had bought the enclosure and drives in preparation for use with the Directv HR20 and was very happy that it works with 8300HD.
I found a very helpful AVS forum entry here, full of useful information regarding the 8300HD. I was able to validate that it was using 911GB of the external storage by enabling diagnostic mode (on the front of the unit hold the select button down until envelope flashes on display, then press info button. use page up/down button on remote to cycle through pages).

Screen print of external storage partition using Sling Player via component output (more on that issue later).
I am however getting some pixelation every 7 - 10 minutes on HD channels which gets to be annoying. My Internet signal is so strong that Comcast had installed an attenuator at the modem, so I figured the HD service should be fine. I am now using a splitter which does not seem to have affected the Internet service (http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ average 7Mbps down/263Kbps up). I need to recheck all my connections and coax connectors before I call Comcast again.
My next issue came with the HDMI connection which seem to work fine as long as the 8300HD configuration was not altered and it performed the upconversion of the Standard Definition (SD) channels. This meant that all of the output was in 1080i. Well I paid what I consider a lot of money for the Sony XBR and all of the published reviews point to the fact that it performs a great job at displaying native resolution signals. I wanted to have the 8300HD pass through the image resolution it received from Comcast to the TV. Unfortunately, once I started mucking with the setup to pass through the SD signal directly to the TV, HDMI went haywire and forced everything even HD down to the 480i resolution. I finally resolved the issue and will post my solution tomorrow...
Go to Part 2.
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