Samsung TV

Some friends recently bought themselves a nice new TV, a Samsung 46ES6800: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-46-inch-UE46ES6800-Widescreen-Processor/dp/B007JURIDQ

They previously had a Sky decoder and satellite dish, but had stopped subscribing to Sky. They had connected the satellite to the TV, which has its own built-in decoders, so no longer using the Sky decoder, and were getting 300+ channels, but almost all of them were scrambled. Channel 5 was missing entirely and the channel numbers were all over the place – they wanted BBC1 on channel 1, BBC2 on 2, etc.

The TV has an auto-tune feature with 4 input settings:

• Air is for old-style aerials, which can still pick-up old analogue channels as well as the new digital Freeview ones (depending on where you live in the UK), but they don’t have one of these.
• Satellite is for the satellite dish and is what they were using which gave the results described above. Freesat (below) turns out to be the better choice.
• Cable would be for a cable service such as Virgin Media, but this isn’t widely available in the UK and was not relevant.
• Freesat turns out to be the one they wanted. After selecting this and letting it auto-tune they now have 50+ free channels, including Channel 5, all nicely ordered.

The TV remote has some recording buttons near the bottom. Pressing these brought up some warnings about USB devices being missing. The printed user manual doesn’t mention this feature, but the TV has a built-in user manual. A bit of digging implies that the TV can record to hard disk (HDD) via USB to provide video recording (PVR) functionality and recommends a minimum of a 5,400 RPM drive. These are quite common now and can be had from Amazon. Here’s an example: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-Slimline-Portable-Hard-Drive/dp/B008PABFX8/

Not tried it yet though.