Digital TV Converter

Yesterday, a friend asked me to go shopping with her to go find a digital TV converter box. I figured it couldn't be that bad, since she already had fairly good analog reception (I'm very jealous about that) and she had to coupon already.

We went to Target, where they had a seleciton of 3 devices, but they were all sold out. We drove across the street to Walmart (yeah, Mountain View is weird that they have both of them next to each other) but the noticed there was a Radio Shack. I figured if Target is sold out, there is a good chance Walmart is also sold out, so we went into Radio Shack.

We ended up getting their Digital Stream Digital-to-Analog Converter w/ Pass-through which was 20 bucks after the 40 dollar coupon. I thought this would just be a really simple box that does the conversion and then lets your TV pretend that this is how things have been the whole time, but in fact its a lot more like a VCR where you set it to channel 3 and then use the converters own UI and remote to view the channels.

She was able to get a lot more channels that she could on analog. She got all the major over-air networks (Fox, CBS, ABC, NBC). The quality was much better than before, and the glitching was only minor. We managed to get it set up in time to see Steve Wozniak give a poor performance on Dancing with the Stars. Digital lets each station have multiple sub-stations, so she now gets a couple of weather-oriented stations, a lot of forien programming, and a ton of public broadcasting stuff.

As someone who never had cable until after college, I can appriciate good over the air TV. I hope all my readers can have a smoothe upgrade to digital-TV.