Mediasonic ATSC Digital Converter Box with TV Tuner Function (HW130RN)

I am one of the few people that purchased the Vizio Chromecast TV's which were only in stores for one year. It is basically a computer monitor with a built in ROKU. You will need this product if you have the same TV and want to add local channels. It allows you to convert coaxial to HDMI. It worked perfectly. I did purchase a HDMI cable separately just to be sure. The channel quality is decent on some channels, better on others. Since I don't have cable I just wanted to make sure I am able to still see the news if my internet goes out. (This has happened multiple times). Overall, good product.

This was purchased as a gift for my mom. She uses an antenna to get local stations over the air and we live in an area that is transitioning to ATSC 3.0 which her current television has a tuner for. Unfortunately, stations in the area are implementing DRM on the broadcasts that block shows and live sports. The area still broadcasts ATSC 1.0 for these stations, so this tuner is meant to provide access to stations that currently are not supported on the newer tuner. This box meets expectations for the price. The digital picture looks good on the TV and the installation was straight forward. It found the local stations with no issue with just an indoor antenna. The remote control buttons are sometimes not as responsive as I would like. Because of this, I gave this 4 stars. It meets my expectations, but does not exceed them.

I bought this product months earlier than I actually intended to use it but once I finally did use it it worked perfectly for about 2 weeks and completely just died. Would not even turn on. But by then Amazon’s return policy had passed. So I had to either take the L on this or try contacting the manufacturer which I did. Surprisingly the manufacturer’s support team immediately responded and shipped me a replacement that same day. The usually frustrating process was almost as effortlessly as it was expeditiously. This is what great customer service looks and feels like. Now they have a customer for life.

It often freezes on startup. it often freezes in the menus. It often fails to detect inputs, or fails to read detected inputs. It is not suitable for playing media from a USB drive because it doesn't support most file formats, and it can't handle most codecs for file formats that it does support.. The best thing I can say about it is that it's able to properly handle a TV signal 60-70% of the time. If that's all you want to do with it, it's better than nothing.

For the price I am keeping it to watch ota MLB and NF. Image is sharp and works well with my antenna. But the remote doesn't work very well, 10 ft away and you have to point to directly at the tuner and press it multiple times which would be infuriating daily use.