How to Connect a Digital to Analog TV Converter Box

Transcripts

Joel Topcik: Hi, I am Joel Topcik from Broadcasting & Cable Magazine. We are talking about how you can prepare for the digital television transition. In this segment, John Taylor from LG Electronics will provide a demonstration of over-the- air digital TV and walk you through the installation of a Digital-to-Analog Converter box which will allow you to watch digital broadcast on an analog TV.

John Taylor: I am thrilled to be here today to talk about the Digital-to-Analog Converter boxes that will help consumers make this transition to digital television. Millions of Americans watch analog TV today using an antenna. This is a ten year old TV that uses an analog antenna and as you will see, as you watch the various channels in analog, it's prone to snow and goes an interference just flipping through some of the local stations. Some come in better than others and you can adjust the antenna. We have been doing this since the dawn of television.

What digital brings though, will be a crisp picture like a DVD quality picture and let me show you how we set that up. About three dozen Digital-to-Analog Converter boxes have been certified by the NTIA. This is the Zenith Box, one of the most popular ones. This is available through RadioShack, Circuit City and lots of other retailers. Very similar box will be available through BestBuy. When you get it home, first thing you will see when you open it up is a quick setup guide, ours is in English and Spanish, very simple way to show how to hook it up. In addition, of course, it has an operating guide again, in English and Spanish. The box itself has a handsome, little design that fits most decor, very simple to use which I will show how to install in just a second and also has included a remote control, including the batteries as well as all the cables you need to hook it up, an antenna cable as well as audio-video cables if you like stereo sound.

Connecting your new converter box is really simple. Probably the biggest challenge is turning your old analog TV around so you can get to the antenna inputs. Now that we have turned the analog TV around, I have plugged in the converter box. Let me show you how easy it is to hook up. First you disconnect the antenna from the television set and connect it to the antenna input of the converter box. Next, you take the antenna output from the converter box back to the antenna input of the TV, the same way we have hooked up a VCR for the last 25 years. If your analog TV has audio jacks for stereo sound, the converter box will provide that as well. So all you need to do is hook up the stereo cables to the left and right output jacks of the box to the left and right input jacks on your TV, then you will have stereo sound.

Now that we have hooked up the converter box, I have turned the TV around again and let me show you how we scan the channels. First, you turn on the converter box, turn on the TV and you want to tune the TV to channel three or four just like a VCR. The first thing you will see as in a quick install guide, a welcome screen and you just walk through the process. I am going to choose English as my language, but this box also has the menus in Spanish and French. To search for channels, you push a button and this will go through -- remember this is receiving digital broadcasting through the same antenna that this old TV used to receive the analog broadcasting. So right now, it's searching for the new digital channels. Searching for the digital channels takes under a minute and in our case, we found over 25 digital channels available. From here you have a crystal-clear digital picture.

Remember, the snow, the ghost, the interference we had with the analog signal, now that the digital signal is coming through the same antenna through the converter box, you get this nearly DVD quality picture. Not only is it better picture but you get more programming, so that's it.

Your Digital-to-Analog Converter box is really easy to set up. So you are well prepared for the transition to digital television on February 17th of 2009. Thank you for watching.