Customer Reviews

Zenith HD-SAT520 DirecTV Digital Set Top HD Tuner/Receiver

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've learned my lesson. I'll never buy a Zenith product again.

The problem with being an early adopter of new technology is that you often pay a premium for a less than solid product. I accept that. But you don't expect the device to completely stop working after only a couple of years.

That's the case with the HD-SAT520 I purchased. Picture quality was excellent using DVI with my HD set and the user interface was pretty good.

Even when brand new, I had problems with losing my channels and having to rebuild the channel list. About once a month or so, the video would go out completely - turning to snow - while the audio remained. The only solution when this happened was to power off the unit and back on.

My unit hates power outages. If I lost power - even briefly - I usually had to unplug the receiver's AC power and wait about 60 seconds before plugging it back in. Then I had to wait for the channel list to rebuild again.

I've now had the receiver a little over two years. About two months ago, the receiver started having problems with all channels except for OTA broadcasts going dark with "No Signal" message popping up. This would last for minutes to hours at a time. At first I thought it was a problem with DirecTV's signal and didn't worry about it too much - until I discovered my bedroom receiver (an 8 yr old RCA) was working with no problem at all.

This problem got progressively worse over the last two months - with the loss of signal occurring more and more frequently for longer and longer periods of time. When I bring up the signal strength meter it detects no signal at all.

I'm pretty savvy when it comes to AV and electronics equipment and know to keep my valuable units well ventilated and never stack units one atop the other. I also use high quality power strips / surge suppressors. I believe the malfunction occurred through no fault of mine or through any kind of abnormal use.

I spent almost $600 for this receiver and expected to get at least a good 5 years out of it if not more. Most of my AV components are over 10 years old (except DVD players which seem to die on a yearly basis - at least they're cheap to replace).

Hope this helps someone avoid buying into trouble.

I got one of these at Goodwill and it works great for off air HDTV, better than other Hughes and Samsung models that I've tried. I can get all the Phoenix and Tucson channels just fine. The unit is made by LG and is similar to the Hughes HTL-HD model. I understand the first reviewer's complaint about failures though since I've had 4 older Hughes models not made by LG fail already as well as about 8 Samsung models that I've been using since HDTV first went on the air back in 1999. So far the Zenith and Hughes/LG models seem to be the best made and the most reliable although I also have an LG LST-3510A combo HDTV receiver/DVD player that don't work that well. It plays DVDs OK but still has some software problems and won't even get Ch. 45 but they stopped development of the unit several years ago so there are no more upgrades.