Motorola DCT6200 DTV Receiver

I've been trying to figure out a cheap way to get high definition programming into our house with little success until now. We were on the Dish Network, and switching to their HD package would cost us about $150 for installation and equipment. I can see the cost for the receiver, but after having dealt with their installers before, I was sure that the $50 for installation would be for them to plug in the box, completely screw up the setup (I've got a DVD recorder VCR combo unit and a stereo all in the mix), and leave me with 2 hours of work getting everything connected properly. Then there's the fact that the programming itself would have cost another $20 a month and not given us our local stations in HD, and that pretty much sealed the doom of Dish Network. I next tried buying an antenna that I could use to get over-the-air HD programming. Of course, where I'm at that would require a medium to large outdoor antenna and I don't have the time to properly install one at our house. I was able to get one or two channels over-the-air with a powered antenna, but it did create some issues for non-tech savvy people in the house (constantly changing the TV input depending on what you wanted to watch). Then our local cable provider (Insight) gave us a call. Turns out that for the same price as we were paying for Dish service, they could provide us with the same channels and additional HD programming. Although it is only the local channels and a couple of cable channels in HD, it works out to 9 HD channels (6 local and 3 cable). As part of the switch to cable HD programming, we were given this digital cable box. Before I break down my review, here are the other components of our system, all of which I think I've reviewed on epinions: Hisense 32" LCD HDTV, Pioneer wireless speaker system, Toshiba DVD recorder/ VCR combination unit. Now for the specifics-


Style and quality:

It is a mostly silver box with a few hints of black, which blended in well with our mostly silver and black products. It's rather thin, especially compared to our old Dish receiver (probably half as thick), and has a large LCD display in the front to show you the channel or occasional other important notes. It is a wider box than I had expected though (has to be near 18 inches across). It mostly seems to rely on the display or a few lights on the front to tell you what is going on, so if you accidentally make a change that affects the display status (i.e. changing the output from 480i to 1080i on a display that does not support it), it might take you a while to decipher the lights. Ours seemed a bit "beaten up" even though it was new. It could be that it isn't the bright gray that you may be used to, but more of a darker or flat gray paint job that results in that appearance. It does feel solid though.
Final verdict: looks better than the old black box in our silver and black component pile. Smaller than the Dish receiver. The paint job could have been a bit more sparkly though. Grade - B


Connection setup:

This is the part that I feel can really make or break a piece of electronics. If something is easy to connect and set up, you might be willing to sit through some usage issues. If it is a beast to set up though, the last thing you want to find out is that you then have to spend even more time when you want to use the thing!

The cable company didn't provide an owner's manual for the box (everything I need is in the on-screen help menu I was told), and if you have anything more than just a TV, you'll probably need it! I started off wiring everything myself the way I felt everything should be connected. I found something that seemed to work (I'll describe that a little later on), but then decided to go online and see if I could find a manual and maybe a better way to organize things. Opening the manual, I found about 6 different wiring schematics depending on whether you had a regular or HDTV, a VCR, DVD, stereo, or an A/V receiver. Then you could mix the schematics together depending on what you wanted to do (say a VCR with an A/V receiver). Basically, you either need to know what you are doing or be willing to test a lot of arrangements.

There are a lot of ports to pick from (although some may be switched off depending on your service provider). There is an HDMI port that replaces the DVI port in the manual (at least the one I received no longer had DVI), composite video, and standard S-video and video out ports. There are S-video and standard video in ports, along with the coaxial input. For audio you have the standard right and left audio jacks and also an optical output.

For me, I wanted to be able to record DVR programs or regular programs to DVD and get audio through the Pioneer system. My display has one HDMI input and one composite input, and both the DVD/VCR and the 6200 can output HD (or upscaled video) via composite and HDMI. So what I did was to connect the 6200 to the display via HDMI. Then I connected the audio out for the 6200 to the TV IN input on the Pioneer, so the audio matches when I watch TV (HDMI provides audio for the display speakers). The 6200 is connected to the DVD/VCR via coaxial cable, which may not be the greatest for recording, but it will have to do until I can play with the settings more. It's the only way I have for getting audio and video to the DVD/VCR. If I run a splitter in front of the 6200 and split the cable signal between the two, then I'll have to do more work to move DVR shows from the 6200 to DVD, so however I reorganize things has to maintain the ability to transfer DVR to DVD. The DVD/VCR is connected to the display via the composite input, which still gives a great picture but doesn't let me choose the input setting. That's actually fine since for the most part the DVD/VCR does a good job with upscaling on its own properly. The audio for the DVD/VCR runs into the DVD IN port on the Pioneer, and the Pioneer output goes into the audio in for the composite video port, so the audio matches when watching movies or TV through the DVD/VCR. As you can see then, it's quite a wiring scheme. I guess I can't blame the Dish people for just throwing up their hands when they have to set up something like that! There is still a standard video out on the 6200, so I may try using that along with some Y cables for the audio to split the audio into the DVD/VCR unit and see if that improves DVD recordings.

Final verdict: you've got to really know what you're doing if you have more than one component to add in with this box and your TV, so make sure you can get the manual. Also, have the manuals for your other components handy! There are probably all sorts of other things I could get it to do, I just haven't figured those things out yet. I would have graded higher if it had been a less complex set up. Grade - C


Usage-

If you get to the stage where you are actually looking at video the way you want, congratulations! One trick that wasn't well explained to me is how to access the internal menu of the 6200. If you hit the Menu key with the box on, you get the cable company's menu screen. Hitting it while the box is off though gives you access to the 6200 setup screen (including options for HD and SD setup, audio, and close captioning). It took me about 20 minutes to figure that out. The 6200 has to be on to record using DVR (Dish's box could do that without having to be officially "On"), so you can't turn it off while it is recording. That also means you can't access the menu screen when recording. Most likely though that isn't a screen you would need to get to very often after you are all set up.

Standard definition programming looks ok on my display. I'll need to do some tweaking though, as it looked better through the Dish receiver. The HD programming does look DVD quality, so I feel good about that. Originally I ran my Dish signal through the DVD/VCR and let the DVD/VCR upscale SD programming and got a better picture (maybe the processor is better in the DVD/VCR than in the Dish box or the display itself, so it can clean up the SD image better?). I don't really want to do that in this configuration, but it's always a possibility. Ah, what happened to the good old days where two 3ft. lengths of coaxial were all you needed:-)

The menu screens available with the 6200 running are really all determined by your cable provider, so that will vary a lot I suppose. Dish liked to compress your video into a small box while you were in the menu screens, while the 6200 just eats up the bottom third of the screen without resizing anything.

The 6200 has DVR functionality, and has an 80GB hard drive. That turns out to be about 40 hours of standard definition TV and even less for HD I would assume. It would be nice if it had a larger drive (maybe something closer to 200-300GB), but I'll take what I can get if I can easily transfer video to a DVD as a way to move content off of the DVR.

Final verdict: I got my HD, but at what price? SD not as good as with Dish, but acceptable for an LCD display. HD looks as good as what I've seen on showroom floors. DVR a little low capacity. Grade - C


Remote-

The included remote can theoretically operate the 6200, your TV, and three other devices. The code for the display didn't work (although Hisense was listed), so I moved back to my Logitech Harmony remote, which does seem to be working fine with the 6200. The remote is very large and feels a bit clunky (it makes my Harmony remote look like a baby). It really looks like a large rectangle perched on a smaller rectangle with a bunch of buttons everywhere. The DVR-related buttons are prominent, and the other buttons are for the most part well spaced. It does though feel like you should be using two hands whenever operating the remote.

Final verdict- it would have been nice to get something sleek and slim (maybe like what motorola's website suggests is the remote), but what you get looks more like a cheap Wal-Mart universal remote. Grade - C-


Overall verdict:

I wanted HD, and I got HD. With that I got a wiring nightmare and am still trying to sort out the best way to get the system to do everything I want it to do at the best quality/ resolution available to me. I can see now why people pay hundreds of dollars to have people come in and set up systems like this, but that takes all the fun out of doing it yourself:-) Part of the problem is just in having a display that lacks two HDMI ports, but that's probably a high end display (if you can even find one with two HDMI ports). Sorry, too poor for that! I'm sure no one in the industry will ever come out with a DVD recorder with an HDMI in port so that you can pass the signal through your DVD recorder (that's just asking for people to come up with hacks for directly and easily recording HD to DVD). If I ever decide that I don't want to be able to go from DVR to DVD, then the wiring becomes much easier and I can really play with things, but until then I'm stuck with this setup. Maybe I'll even try having two inputs to the DVD/VCR, one for recording direct from the source cable and one for recording from DVR. If I do that and see any improvement, I'll make sure to let everyone know! At least my cable company is paying the disconnect fees for switching to them from Dish.
Overall grade- B-