My coupons finally arrived (two months after applying on the website). I went to Wal-Mart looking for a Magnavox, but they only had RCAs, which looked so cheesy that I passed.
At Circuit City I bought a Zenith DTT900. I initially tested it with a 1980s solid state color TV and was quite impressed. Setup is a snap; it found about 20 channels.
This was using a Radio Shack amplified rabbit ear antenna. In this neighborhood, everybody has satellite TV. Analog reception on rabbit ears is marginal: only a few stations, lots of fiddling with the antenna, and reception is often degraded if you walk within a few feet of the antenna.
Using the DTV box, reception was dramatically improved in every way. Video and audio are excellent -- and look at all those new channels.
I next moved to the room where my RCA 630TS lives and hooked it up. Again, dramatic improvement over what you could get with naked rabbit ears. I have never seen this kind of performance from my 630, apart from playing a DVD.
I had heard other reports about low audio volume with the Zenith/Insignia boxes, but that does not seem to be a problem here.
I did switch the audio to mono using the menu, and turned up the box volume all the way. With those settings, I get good volume and excellent fidelity with the 630's volume control turned up one-third to halfway at most. That's higher than I would turn it using analog rabbit ears, but there is still plenty of "headroom" if you want to turn it to get blasting volume (& eventually distortion).
The converter turns my beloved 630 into a practical daily watcher, as opposed to a novelty that you demo for occasional visitors. You can basically sit back and change channels with the remote. I need to get out of the habit of darting up to fiddle with the picture control, fine tuning, etc., for every channel change.
A few of the channels discovered during the initial setup with a modern TV were not watchable on the 630 (freezing or blanking out). Again, these TVs are located in parts of the house and this is a marginal reception area, so that may be understandable.
A good initial experience, in short.
Phil Nelson
Phil's Old Radios
http://antiqueradio.org/index.html