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ATSC converter boxes were engineered to fail

Chuck(G)

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Apropos of nothing in particular.

Looking at my junkpile, I have a few defunct ATSC converter boxes from the 2006-ish era. Bricked or otherwise nonfunctional--I even had a remote control start smoking. These are the things for which the USG issued $40 coupons (still have those).

Other than being cheaply constructed, none has sufficient heat-dissipation capabilities--little ventilation, no fan and there's usually a chip with a small heatsink that commits heat-suicide. The worst were the ones with the Marvel chip.

The "we'll give you a heckuva deal on a converter box so you don't have to buy a new TV" deal was a scam from the very first day. The boxes were engineered to die.

I wonder how many of today's devices are similarly constructed. We've all see LCD monitors where capacitors were placed right next to (or hot-glued to) the inverter heatsinks, which guarantee failure.
 
It is a terrible thing Chuck, but I think pretty much everything is designed to either fail (requiring repurchase of a new model), or designed to fail to support a pricy repair scenario. We've come a long way from building things to the best of our ability.
 
I was curious if these things were still readily available, new. The Walmart site shows one at my local neighborhood market for $7. That’s crazy. I think I may grab one next time I drive that way.
 
Bricked or otherwise nonfunctional--I even had a remote control start smoking.

Kind of curious about the failure mode of that smoking remote.

Fairly recent Roku remotes have a failure condition where a component in them starts doing "something" that basically amounts to a hard short. (They have a KB that mentions the "is your remote getting hot?" case, but they don't explain it, just say to take the batteries out, set it somewhere not flammable until it cools off, and buy a new one.) Happened to mine a couple years ago. It started out gradually, with the remote killing a set of batteries in a few days; I wrongly accused the kids of leaving it between the couch cushions or something so the buttons were held down constantly, but then it got "real bad" and drained a set of batteries to the point they started leaking in about half an hour.

Broke the no-user-serviceable-parts-inside remote apart to investigate, found the component that was getting hot was a thing that looked like a surface-mount metal cased crystal but had no decipherable markings.
 
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It's not the 90's anymore. Most businesses who are below enterprise tier know that it's a bad long-term plan to produce goods that have a long service life. Ignoring the requirement to supply support you simply end up with strong initial sales and then vanish into the infinite plane of time as consumers never need to replace it or upgrade it. Makes shareholders nervous because someone will eventually come along, make one improvement and that's it for your product.
It was a thing I noticed even with Kirby. They will still rebuild a 70 year old vacuum but the replacement impeller is plastic as opposed to aluminum because it will wear out far sooner.
 
I was curious if these things were still readily available, new. The Walmart site shows one at my local neighborhood market for $7. That’s crazy. I think I may grab one next time I drive that way.

Yes, actually the iView 3500STBII is still made, and with some judicious shopping can be had for about $30 new. It can record onto USB memory and has an HDMI output as well as the usual types. If you get one, I'd remove the top or otherwise improve the heat sinking on the Marvel chip--it gets bloody hot as-is.

But $30 spent every couple of years is not much of a bargain when you consider that a 40" LED FireTV can be had for $169 new.
 
I couldn’t find it. I checked the clearance section. There isn’t really an “electronics” section except for some stuff on one check out aisle, so who knows where it’s hiding. :)
 
I still have the 2 I purchased new back then and never really used (Insignia brand from Bestbuy). No idea if they still function but I would guess they do since they never ran long enough to overheat. I suspected they were meant to work a couple years and then die which was long enough to get people to use their old TVs before buying a new one.

Still have my brothers Panasonic 27" CRT TV I fixed (bad solder joint) so I can it use with old consoles (lightguns don't work on LCD).
 
Apropos of nothing in particular.

Looking at my junkpile, I have a few defunct ATSC converter boxes from the 2006-ish era. Bricked or otherwise nonfunctional--I even had a remote control start smoking. These are the things for which the USG issued $40 coupons (still have those).

Other than being cheaply constructed, none has sufficient heat-dissipation capabilities--little ventilation, no fan and there's usually a chip with a small heatsink that commits heat-suicide. The worst were the ones with the Marvel chip.

The "we'll give you a heckuva deal on a converter box so you don't have to buy a new TV" deal was a scam from the very first day. The boxes were engineered to die.

I wonder how many of today's devices are similarly constructed. We've all see LCD monitors where capacitors were placed right next to (or hot-glued to) the inverter heatsinks, which guarantee failure.

They were only intended to carry you through the transition until digital TV's became more widely available. You're not supposed to still be using them 15 years later. If they served their purpose, why rant about it?
 
"Not supposed to?" Was there a law that was passed that made it illegal to use a converter box after 15 years? The last box was purchased new 3 years ago (yes, they're still made). In my bedroom I still have a great flat-screen CRT TV that works very well, thank you. Oh, but the CRT TV wasn't supposed to last more than a couple of years?

It's electronic--it can be designed to last, rather than to eat itself alive. I find that attitude a bit strange on a forum that caters to vintage computers. You're not supposed to be using a PC XT or C64 35 years later, after all.
 
There is planned an ATSC 3.0, that will support 4K. In will require a converter box, which probably will be a discounted option when a big push is made.

But don't worry, broadcasters do not have to shut off ATSC 1.0 if they don't want to.
 
I seem to recall that if you ran a repeater, it was a number of years before you had to shut off traditional NTSC broadcasts. I believe that most cable systems are years behind the 4K push.

Well, even a 720p TV image looks fine to me at 6 feet viewing distance. For most things, 1080p is meh; 4K is interesting, but not all that visible unless you're right on top of it.

Computer images viewed at 18" are a somewhat different matter. On a 27" display, 1080 lines doesn't quite cut it for me. WQHD is fine, however.

Somewhat ironic, this, considering that many people receive their visual content via cellphone.
 
From my understanding over the air broadcast is still 720p/1080I so having a 4k TV is a bit of a waste. Not that much on Netflix is 4k and you have to pay for the UltraHD plan to view it (I don't).

People view video on cellphones mostly because young people share links on their cells and most have unlimited wireless plans for the bandwidth.
 
4K TVs look amazing when you're in the showroom right up next to the screen and it's playing a high-bit-rate demo, but I know I'm personally far too blind to tell the difference from the ten feet-ish away I'd be watching from in my living room. Clearly I need to invest in a larger TV.

(65" seemed YUGE when I bought it in 2013 and at the time that size still cost as much as a functional used car. That latter bit makes me reluctant to get rid of it as long as it's working and it still looks fine to me, but I'm sure saying that outs me as some kind of unsophisticated technological hillbilly.)
 
Cable boxes, wireless routers, and USB hubs are also known to overheat, especially the ones in plastic cases. I've seen people drill holes in the top cover to help vent out the heat.


There are still some low-power analog TV stations on the air, mostly ones on Channel 6 acting as FM radio stations via their audio carrier at 87.75 MHz, but the FCC has ruled that they must finally covert to digital or shut down by July 13th, 2021.
 
I have one a simple RCA converter box, the first one I had up and died for no explicable reason. I bought another off of ebeh and it is still working. I also bought a spare that was a slightly different model, but annoyingly that one does not show preview information for anything but the current show. (The one I use those the current one and the next one). Although that reminds me that some channels were one in a while stuffing SOMETHING in there that would cause the box to crash and shut off if I tried to view a particular programs preview information.

My little 15" TV is all I need to turn on once a day at 5:00pm to find out what I am supposed to be afraid of today. Watch DVDs on a Windows 95 computer with a 17" CRT, but those ultra-ultra-ultra-ultra-widescreen (AKA shortscreen) formats greatly reduce the resolution.
 
4K TVs look amazing when you're in the showroom right up next to the screen and it's playing a high-bit-rate demo, but I know I'm personally far too blind to tell the difference from the ten feet-ish away I'd be watching from in my living room. Clearly I need to invest in a larger TV.

(65" seemed YUGE when I bought it in 2013 and at the time that size still cost as much as a functional used car. That latter bit makes me reluctant to get rid of it as long as it's working and it still looks fine to me, but I'm sure saying that outs me as some kind of unsophisticated technological hillbilly.)

I have a 55" LG in my basement area bar which I purchased back in 2008. This is the one everyone huddles around for football. I mentioned something about going with a 65" smart tv and everyone said "don't change a thing". so I guess that I won't. The picture is crisp and clear and my crew is in the late 70's - early 80's. 4K to me is Kellogg, Kleenex, Krispy Kreme, and Krogers.
 
My 2013 "Smart TV" stopped being "smart" sometime around 2017 or so after it stopped receiving software updates, causing it and YouTube/Netflix/et al to start growing apart. Considering how much an external dingus like a Roku stick costs I'm fine with that.

2013 isn't a bad vintage for a 1080P TV; it's when things like adaptive LED backlighting and whatnot was becoming mainstream so a decent LED panel was no longer obviously outclassed by dying tech like plasma, and it's overall a huge improvement over the 2005-ish rear-projection model it replaced. (Its predecessor was one of the first Sony WEGAs to come with an ATSC tuner built in; a friend of mine had a slightly older model of the same chassis that didn't have one because it sufficiently predated the 2005 "all TVs bigger than whatever need to have one" mandate. Granted I'm enough of a cheapskate I probably would have milked more miles out of that TV, especially since I'd ponied up for a new lamp for it recently, but the LCD projection module went bad.) It still looks "fine", it has lots of inputs, and although I don't make a lot of use of it it's a nice bonus that its tuner/scaler can handle NTSC and its processing engine does a remarkably good job of turning the terrible output from unmodified RF-out game consoles into something tolerable.

(The one thing it kind of chokes on is the output from an Apple II, but pretty much everything not a real CRT TV has problems with that.)
 
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My latest one is a Roku HiSense (made you know where) but has 3 year's worth of warranty. Since it has Roku built in there's one less box that needs to be attached. It's a 43" with a 28" base legs which just makes it on the sunroom's 32" stand. Very cheap at $234. 'She' likes it. Another thing that we like is when you go OTA the tuner has a full descriptive menu.
 
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