Review on Enhanced Ematic Digital TV Converter Box with Recording, Playback, Parental Controls [Model AT103B] by Christian Young

Great picture and sound. But the main reason I bought my first two digital tuners was to convert digital TV signals to analog so I could continue using my outdated tube TV. Back then, taping the show was a secondary function. But now I have a new HDTV with a built in digital tuner, so recording and playback is the main reason for using this external tuner. . You press "Record" to start and "Stop" to stop. Easy. But if you want to *schedule* the recording for later, that's a big problem. It worked fine with my old Koramzi tuner. Press the Program Guide button, press the arrow buttons until you highlight the name of the program you want, press OK and change View to Record. That's all. Four steps may seem like a lot, but they are all simple. With Ematic you call up the EPG, *remember* the start and end time of the program and the station name. . . Press OK, enter the start and end times you need to remember, and then browse the huge list of all the channels the DVR can receive. In Philadelphia I can get 85 channels with a roof antenna. Depending on where in the list the channel I want is located, I might have to scroll A LOT. Coramzy had serious mistakes. The "Record once" option worked fine, but "Record daily" and "Record once a week" did not work. He will record, but not that day. So I'm not a huge fan of the Koramzi 100 I had before, but it still outperformed this Ematic box for scheduled, unattended recording. Also, Koramzi's LCD became a clock when the tuner was off, which I liked, and when the tuner was on, the TV channel number was shown on the display. For example, if you watch FOX 29, it will show 29-1. LCD, but shows the channel's current position in the channel list. So if channel 29-1 is the fifteenth channel in the list, C015 will be displayed. Which I find pretty useless. In both Koramzi and Ematic, the entries are named after the start time and channel and not the name of the show. .So if you plan on keeping some of your recordings for a long time, I recommend downloading a program like VLC Media Player onto your computer, going through a few seconds of each recording so you're sure which show is which, and renaming the show in Windows Explorer. (Your computer's USB ports can use the same flash drives or external hard drives as Ematic.) You can also use Microsoft Windows to create subfolders and move different DVR entries into them. Shows seem like a hassle, at least create folders named after some common shows and move their episodes into those folders. You can't create subfolders when using the DVR, but you can delete them and browse them to find the show (Be careful because I don't think you delete a full folder the same way you delete an empty one. ) Though Streaming is now common, I still recommend buying a cheap DVR as it allows you to watch commercials quickly. You can't skip ads on Hulu. , unless you pay for a more expensive subscription. (You can't use it to record Hulu or other internet content, only the over-the-air channels received via an antenna.) Buy a DVR anyway, just not this model.