Review: Insigna NS-DXA1 DTV Tuner

The Insignia NS-DXA1 is a DTV2009 coupon-compatible DTV tuner stocked by Best Buy. For those of us still relying on rabbit-ear and rooftop antennas for television service, one of these boxes will be required within the United States to receive television signals on our old non-HD television sets. At $59.99, the NS-DXA1 is affordably priced ($19.99 with a $40 coupon) and works with most of your existing television equipment.

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The installation procedure for the NS-DXA1 is fairly simple: plug your antenna into the back of the box, hook the box to your TV with the included coaxial or composite cables (I chose to use composite video so that I could run the signal past my capture card to produce these screenshots), and plug the box in. Unfortunately, there's no power pass-through on the box itself for a TV, as is featured in cable and satellite equivalents such as the Motorola DCT2000-series units issued by Comcast and Verizon, so you'll need a separate power outlet for the box. On the other hand, it comes nowhere close to the gargantuan size of a Motorola box either, which is welcome to those with smaller TVs that can't easily seat the box on top.

The Insignia NS-DXA1 seated atop a 19" tube, connected to a GE Optima antenna.

Upon powering up, you'll be presented with a series of dialogs prompting you to configure the box. While the setup process is very straightforward, it does leave one nostalgic of the times when TV was as simple as plugging in an antenna and tuning as needed.

Though it cannot be discerned from these screenshots, the NS-DXA1's on-screen dialogs suffer from a severe case of text flicker. I was annoyed quickly enough that I turned off the TV and began setting up using Videolan Client on my PC instead. Thankfully, the actual output picture does not suffer from this problem.

The box and instructions are multilingual and can be read in either English, French, or Spanish. This seems to be fairly common nowadays: my TV/VCR (circa 2003) is capable of switching between English and Spanish upon bootup, and the replacement VCR my parents bought before the turn of the millenium also featured a trilingual English/French/Spanish menu system.

Earlier this decade, some widescreen TVs didn't yet ship with built-in ATSC decoders. For this reason, it's possible to switch the NS-DXA1 into a pseudo-widescreen mode, much like many DVD players are capable of. The output, of course, is still 480i: you'll need to spend about $140 more on a full-fledged ATSC tuner, which isn't subsidized by the $40 DTV2009 program.

Channel setup is automated, though if a station is skipped by the automatic tuner, it's possible to go into the box's settings and add it manually later. One thing you'll notice about DTV is that it tends to run in the UHF band: the box picked up zero channels on VHF frequencies and nineteen on UHF. That's a full ten more channels than I picked up with analog TV!

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Some channels simulcast in both standard-def and hi-def. Here I can pick up WGBH Boston on Channel 2.1 in standard-def and on Channel 2.2 in hi-def. Since the box only outputs 480i, however, HD signals are letterboxed, as shown in the second screenshot, and therefore actually appear to be of a lower resolution than their standard-def counterparts. It is possible, however, to zoom in on a particular part of an HD stream by hitting "Zoom" on the remote and navigating around the image with the arrow keys.

Digital TV is capable of transferring such information as station names and programming information. If you're not looking closely, you may miss the "Guide" and "Display" buttons on the remote, which give you a program guide and program information, respectively. The box can also decode digital closed captioning for the hearing-impaired or for situations where sound levels must be kept to a minimum.

Signal noise is much more annoying in ATSC than NTSC.

The statement flying around the Internet is that digital TV reacts differently to a bad signal than analog TV. This has widely been interpreted to mean that you either get a perfectly clear signal or no signal at all. In actuality, it means that you get half an MPEG-2 stream and therefore half the scan, resulting in compression cubes in place of snow and other analog noise. Above is WUNI Boston, immediately after the box detected the signal with the antenna positioned improperly. On a channel with good reception, picture quality rivals that of standard-def digital cable, which for a wireless system is quite impressive.

As I said before, it's possible to manually add and delete channels from the box's memory. From the same menu, it's also possible to display a signal strength meter for each channel, which aids greatly in positioning an antenna properly. The signal information, I later discovered, can be overlayed directly over the station's feed by hitting "Signal" on the remote. Using this information, I was able to properly position the antenna and correct the picture to near the same quality as the other channels:

One particular problem spot I've read about is that the box cannot pass analog signals back to the TV - this means that if you have a VCR or similar device set to run alongside your RF connection, you'll need to change the channel of the box. By default, the Insignia runs on Channel 3, though this can be switched to Channel 4 from within the setup dialogs to prevent interference with the other device (in this case, Channel 3 would act as your VCR feed, while Channel 4 would be used for TV). Though purely cosmetic, there is a red LED on the front of the case that stays on even when the box is powered off, which can become annoying if you're not used to it.

Overall, the Insignia NS-DX1 is a featured converter that is quite easy to set up and can extend the life of your old 480i tube for a mere $20 (or $60 if you didn't apply for a rebate).