Zenith DTT900
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The different rating systems are geared toward making it easier for you to choose appropriate programs for your younger people so you don’t have to worry about them while watching TV. The Zenith DTV Converter Box also has the downloadable rating ability so if TV stations change their rating system in the future the box will update accordingly, a really nice future proof feature.
The Zenith converter has the usual aspect screen settings but there are many more than the other converter box I reviewed with aspect ratio of the TV for wide screen or standard screen. The digital TV signal is sent in wide screen format and your converter changes that signal to fit on your screen or crops it off so you see the center section of the show. The stations have standardized with this and are sending the digital TV signal in a standard widescreen format that has a ratio of 16 to 9.
This means that the program you see on a widescreen TV is actually wider than it is tall and they have started sending the signals like this for all TV’s. The converter boxes have the choice according to the manufacturer what to do with this signal and how it appears on your analog or standard sized TV screen. Some analog TV’s are also widescreen so this would not be a hassle for anyone who owns a newer widescreen analog television but for the rest of us there are a few ways we can watch our television on a standard screen size.
With the Zenith TV Tuner Box you can view your standard screen television using set by program, letterbox, cropped and squeezed. If you think about this the size of your wide screen TV is different than the standard TV due to it being wider so they have to either squeeze it on the screen or cut it off somehow. The set by program allows the channel to pick what they want to show it as; this would probably be different for movies and TV’s show as well as news.
The letterbox will have a black area above and below the box with the television show on it to allow all the sent digital television show to be seen on your TV. The cropped format will cut off each side of the screen so you miss things that are happening one each side of the screen, usually not much of a problem. The squeezed is not really useful as it stretches the picture to fit on your screen and makes everything look odd.
Sometimes it is nice to watch a movie or TV show in the widescreen format as you get to see more of what is happening but for things like news and talk shows you really don’t miss much by cropping the sides off. With all these choices you can quickly and easily change the formats on the fly using the zoom button when you start watching a show so you see what you want and not what the manufacturer thinks you should be watching.
I guess that is the main difference with the Zenith converter box and some of the others I have seen, the user friendly aspects and you’re given the choices instead of only having the choice they think you should use. I like the feature of being able to turn the TV on and off with the Zenith remote as well but a volume would have been nice as well. They have a list of controllable TV brands for use with the TV power button and it is easy to set the remote to work with your TV. My TV on off using the Zenith remote worked without having to program it, lucky I guess.
The Zenith converter box is really my choice so far and I have seen three DTV converter boxes and have read a lot about them on the internet. I hope I have helped in your choice of a DTV converter box and answered some questions you may have as well as showed why the Zenith TV Tuner Box DTT900 is a great choice for your DTV converter box.