RuggerRob

Has anyone seen the new Zenith HD SAT520 (the Sony HD200 twin)? According to an email I received a while back from Zenith they should have been in stores already. My local dealer was anticipating 12 units last week. He now says that Zenith claims to have had a box-car load of 8000 units stolen. Zenith's online dealer, J and R, had no idea when they were getting them in, supposedly their on backorder...eventhough website says pre-orders being taken ($699.98 BTW).

Does anyone have a clue as to when they'll hit the market?

spetsu

I pre-ordered it a month ago from a distributor. They have not received it yet either. The west coast port strike is a huge contributor to the delay. Just ask your local import car dealer what they think of the strike.

Where did you see the $699 price? The lowest I've seen it advertised for was $799. Americansatellite is selling it for $899. I paid $719 for mine

RuggerRob

One of Zenith's online retailers, J and R (jandr.com), is taking pre-orders for the unit for $699.98.

spetsu

Picking up my SAT520 today from the distributor and I will set up the oval dish today as well. I will report back on the performance of the unit.

spetsu

OK, I have the Zenith SAT-520 hooked up now. It's pretty nice and gives me a better SD conversion than my old RCA. The HD picture quality is pretty freakin awesome, although I still wish there were more picture quality customization feeatures included with the box. For 700 bucks I would have expect a little bit more in that department. But overall, so far I'm happy with it.

PS: Zenith also has the nice triple-LNB dish to go along with the unit. It's a ***** to set-up, but Showtime HD is worth it - now they need to show more HD Movies....

RuggerRob

Spetsu- I picked mine up today as well. Local dealer finally got their shipment in. $699 at Belmont TV (Washington DC area). They had 12 and were predicting 0 by tomorrow.

I'm in the process of hooking up. Since I'm just adding this to my system I have to put up the new dish (I got the Trek oval). Hopefully, operational by this weekend.

RuggerRob

Let me start by saying this is my first STB. My comments are based only on what I've expereiced in a few short days. I am impressed with the new Zenith STB.

The setup of my STB is not complete. It appears that my Trek dish has a faulty multiswitch. I can only get a signal from Sat A, nothing for Sat B or C. So, I don't get HDNet...it appears to be coming from Sat B, but do get HBO HD. Watched parts of Heist the other night so I could jump between the HD channel and the regular HBO channel, and the differences were significant. My wife ("there are better things to do besides watch TV") even stated that she was impressed. Hooked up my regular Radio Shack antenna to pull in the local digital channels. Most come in without a problem, and look great. A figure a little tweaking of the regular antenna and most will come in. The zenith unit does something with OTA locals and Directv locals, which at first many users may not like, but I find it convenient...and that is the stacking of channels. For example, my local NBC is Ch. 4 and its digital channel is 48, on my old RCA Directv receiver it was 961. Now, I select Ch. 4 on the remote and get my Directv local, select ch up and I get the OTA ch 4, select ch up and I get the Digital Ch 4. Its done this for all the locals. For myself, there's no easier way to explain to my wife how to find the local channels.

So far this unit is a definte THUMBS UP.

spetsu

Hey Rugger,

I had the same problem at first with only getting one Satellite. Having the three LNB dish, you really have to make sure your axes are plumb and straight, and make sure your angular settings are correct. The oval dish is very unforgiving as far as being slightly off in any part of the orientation.

You might want to test which LNB you get the Satellite A signal from. It is possible to get the A satellite Signal on the B LNB if your dish is not pointed correctly. The dish should also point further west than your old dish used to point. I made the mistake at first believing that I had a good signal, only to find out I didn't get the Signal on Sat-B and Sat-C (just like what you descrived). I turned the dish about 6 degrees clockwise, and that fixed the problem. I should have used my compass in the first place, but I did enough of these installations already that I trusted the signal meter more than the compass/heading indicator.

spetsu

On the Sat-520 itself, I keep noticing that in upconversion the picture tends to show "jaggies" indicating a staight pixel multiplication without any smoothing out feature. I tried to fix this through my TV settings, but I still notice it (especially for example when you watch football - the yard lines if shown diagonally exhibit this jagged look). On my bigscreen it's probably more noticeable than on a smaller TV.