Zenith DTT901 Digital TV Tuner Converter Box with Analog Pass-Through

I bought this waaay after the digital transition, so I payed full price for a used one, but to be honest, it is a high quality unit. Low noise and clear picture, good sound. Very pleased with my purchase. Compared to an APEX digital converter, the Zenith is far superior. I bought the APEX a couple of years ago from Best Buy for $50 and it was just terrible. The remote works when it wants to. You hit the foward channel button, it goes back a channel, if it does anything at all. You practically have to be within 2 feet of the box for the remote to work. Glitched constantly and high noise. Also, no buttons on the front of the unit itself except for the power button. No channel buttons, and even the power button is tempermental. Had me wondering why they even bothered to make such a crappy product. You can't even find digital converters at the store anymore. But the zenith is wonderful, remote works perfectly, guides are excellent, low noise, and just an all around wonderful device. Would recommend the zenith to anyone. APEX, not so much.

Best clearest images, great product, easy setup .

TL;DR: For your old tube TV, this is what you want. 4 stars, but with caveat.Read on:A little background about me: I've been playing with digital TV converters since the conversion in 2008 and have spent most of my time with WinTV cards/dongles on Linux and Windows and for a couple years used a Mediasonic ATSC Digital Converter for my old 36" RCA tube TV.(I tell my kids: If you want to watch Star Trek TOS the way it was intended, this is the only way.)I was getting the best reception with 2 Mohu Leaf antennas (the flat ones you hang on a wall) that I joined with a splitter and set at 90 degrees to each other to get 360-degree coverage.Now, I recently moved, and although my new home is at higher elevation, my office is underground and in the middle of the house. Until I get things situated, I just put up my antennas down here and they do okay. I added a ClearStream Multi-Directional antenna recently, and until I can get it mounted outside, it's just hanging from the floor joists above my desk. I expected a miracle, but performance was no better than the Mohu Leaf.Unfortunately, in the move to the new home, I lost the remote to my Mediasonic, so I decided to replace the whole unit for my 36" RCA. I wanted something better. The new feature-packed units looked good, but the Zenith DTT901 I'm reviewing now was getting incredible reviews. It was more than I wanted to spend, and it was old technology, but what the heck, I'm in an underground office, this isn't for looks. So I tried it.And a miracle occurred. I have never (ever) in my years capturing digital TV had a better experience. The Zenith DTT901 detects signals that a WinTV dongle and Mediasonic don't, and the picture is clear, stable, and a pleasure to watch. The remote is simple to pair with the old TV and makes aspect ratio changes easy (critical on old 4x3 TVs).(I'm a HAM radio operator, so I know a receiver is only as good as it's antenna; but a lousy receiver isn't going to get much better with a great antenna, either.)Now, a caveat. It was (I thought) sold as new. It's not. It's been used and came in a scuffed original box, wasn't even sealed with tape - it fell open when I picked it up off my doorstep, and my heart sank. But it had all the parts, all the documentation, and a used (but cleaned up) original remote.I was so disappointed when I saw this on my doorstep. I thought, "Well, you learned your lesson. Nobody keeps unopened tech from 2008 lying around." How in the world it survived the trip to my house without getting scattered from here to Timbuktu is beyond me.But it did, and it was worth every penny. The unit itself is pristine, looks like new, not a scratch.Important Note: there's no HDMI, no USB, no Wi-Fi and smart innards, just coax and RCA jacks. If you want fancy, tiny, streaming, DVR or want to show off, this isn't for you, but if you want to bring that old tube TV back to life like it's the 1960s again, this is the one.Why 4 stars and not 5 ? Packaging. I feel like this delivery could very easily have gone south. Seller needs to take more care.Live long and prosper. 🖖2025-07-26 update: I'm getting an occasional scratchy picture accompanied by a static sound. It's not typical of a fading digital signal, but the Zenith DTT901 doesn't process signals the way newer equipment does. If a signal is weak, instead of giving a typical blocks-y picture that eventually goes black, it will show a degraded picture (sort of slashed, twisted and stretched), like in the old analog days when you got a snowy picture with a bad signal (in other words, it does its best to deliver the signal it's receiving). It's infrequent, so may also be RF interference from the mechanicals and plethora of modern electronics and internet devices all over the house. I'm also in the dungeon where where all the utilities enter the house, and the antenna is down here with me. I'm amazed I'm getting the signal I am.

Digital TV Tuner Is So Helpful, I love that I get a lot of channels with great reception and I don't pay any monthly fees and I don't need any Wi-Fi

This item was returned. Out of the box the Zenith converter box appeared new -- as advertised, but when plugged in no light appeared. (This unit sports a red light when off -- blue light when on). Through trial and error I found that to get a red or blue light the unit had to be plugged in for a few minutes ... then unplugged and plugged back in. After the unit sat in the off position (red light) the only way to get it on was to unplug and plug back in. A bit too much plugging and unplugging for me. Especially for the almost $80.00 price tag. I found another new unit (that came right on when plugged in) for $30.00 less on another web site.

The best DTV converter is an oldie. Made in January, 2009, this converter outperforms any currently made product of its type. Although it lacks the recently added features, such as an HDMI output jack or TV programming titles, it shines in the reliability, sensitivity and picture quality categories. What a pleasure to see a properly performing converter come out of its 7 year old box. Too bad LC/Samsung no longer manufactures converters. Maybe because this unit was manufactured when digital transmissions were mandated would account for its high quality, or it could simply be the quality control of the manufacturer; whatever the reason, this is a great product. It's only minor downside is the printing of the control functions on the remote control. The letters are too dull and too small to read easily in a semi-lit room. Otherwise, this is the best DTV converter I have used, and I've gone through too many of them.

I wanted to late to set up only to find out the unit actually don’t work. I stuck with a paper weight and SMH.

We are downsizing and when we moved from a house to an apartment, we decided to cut Cable TV back to only internet. That dropped our bill from $160/month to $50/month. After a few weeks, we noticed that the only thing we really missed was local news. Since our TV was old, we need a converter box. There were a lot of other cheaper units, but they all seemed to have quality problems. This unit in combination with a "RCA ANT1450BR Multi-Directional Amplified Digital Antenna" delivers outstanding reception - more than 20 channels in our North Austin apartment.By the way -> when we dropped cable and switched to (free) digital broadcasting we discovered that our channel selection actually got BETTER in that the cable companies only allocate one channel to the local PBS station (KLRU) while in the digital broadcast realm, that same station broadcasts 4 channels of interesting content that is uniformly more interesting than the 80 channels of lowest-common-denominator drivel that that Cable company was broadcasting...