HD Tuners
 

I have had a 42 inch LG plasma with no on board tuner. I use a Samsung ATSC unit but sensitivity is poor. Are there any ATSC true HD (not converter boxes, but one with HD out) boxes out there that are better than others?

There are converter boxes with HDMI out, if that's what you mean Example: https://www.amazon.com/Mediasonic-Ho...words=homeworx
Also more expensive Channel Master dual tuner DVR: https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Video...nel+master+DVr

Don't get the medasonic. Go to walmart and use site to store and get the ematic converter its true 1080i. I bought the mediasonic it barley lasted a year.

I got this ematic converter box at walmart.com and it has good points and bad points. Mostly good. I hooked it to my 19" Zenith System 3 in the dining room so I could get the DTV local channels on my cable that's mostly analog. It does work fine for that, but the only major drawback is it picked up a lot of scrambled cable channels I will have to de-program out of the channel scan. When I had an antenna connected, it scanned over the air channels a lot better than cable. And of course your cable could be different from mine, so YMMV.

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Ematic-AT1...ities/28505040

It also has a feature I've only started to use. It can DVR timer record to to a flash drive or external USB HD. I wasn't particularly impressed with the reception over the air with a rabbit ears RCA antenna from walmart.com, so have a good outside antenna if you can. It all depends on how far you are from the station.

It's very versatile in that it has the regular F connectors for antenna in and TV out on channel 3 or 4, video and stereo audio out and HDMI out.

In the era when name brands made digital-TV set-top tuners for the USA market (1999-2006, roughly), the best-performing tuners were the LG-built ones in 2003-05, which were sold under several brands. There were versions with and without DirecTV satellite tuning built in, which can be turned off in the menus. I do not remember the model numbers exactly, but they were roughly these:

Zenith HD-SAT520 and HD420
Sony SAT-HD200 and -300 (but not the -100 model)
Hughes HTL-HD
LG LST-3400, 3500, 3510 (one of those was also a DVR as well)