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Sony and Zenith have enviable records in the world of DirecTV and digital television set-top boxes. Sony's first such product, the SAT-HD100, was among the best on the market, with topnotch performance and a host of enviable features. That receiver, along with one by Panasonic, were the two most sensitive I had ever seen. And while the Sony had some problems, among them a noisy fan and the lack of aspect-ratio control, last year I judged it the best of a troubled lot.

Zenith invented 8-VSB, the transmission system for digital television, and every DTV tuner is built around an 8-VSB chip licensed from Zenith, a wholly owned subsidiary of South Korea's LG Electronics. Zenith's first HDTV receiver was a professional product, the IQADTV1W, which cost $5995 and was by far the best digital receiver of 1999—as it ought to have been, considering the price. Zenith's second-generation receiver, last year's DTV 1080, was a fine product whose performance didn't quite measure up to that of the top-of-the-line products from Sony, Panasonic, and Mitsubishi/Toshiba/Hughes (the latter three were all built on the same Hughes chassis).

It's not uncommon for one company that doesn't want to build a product from scratch to buy a second company's product, replace the faceplate, tweak the feature set, add its own remote, and sell it under its own brand name. Both of these tuners were made in Korea by Zenith/LG Electronics, and are nearly identical. The chassis, rear panel, jacks, and onscreen menus are all the same; a few slight differences, including the front panels, account for the slightly different external dimensions and weights. Both have the same six front-panel buttons—Display format, Information, Menu, Guide, Select, and Exit—placed and labeled a bit differently. A peek inside shows that the circuitry and internal layout are as close as it is possible to determine without schematics and parts lists, though two large integrated circuits from LGE are visible in each.

Companies don't like to discuss these arrangements, but it's easy to see why Sony might have made this choice: DTV receiver boxes are not big sellers. In fact, I've been told by one manufacturer that they lose money on the product. Sony, a full-service company, must have a DTV box in its lineup, but they may have decided they would rather invest their R&D dollars in more important and profitable products.

Sony's suggested retail price for the SAT-HD200 is $200 higher than Zenith's price for the HD-SAT520, but Sony says the actual sale price in most stores will be $799, with possible discounts below that. However you count it, however, the Sony will be more expensive.

Both receivers come in sleek silver boxes of brushed metal. Each has a big front-panel display, something offered by no other receiver of this sort that I've seen. Some may view such a display as redundant, but I've found it quite convenient. It tells you what the box is doing—for example, which display format is in use—without your having to call up an onscreen display.

On the back of each receiver is a full suite of outputs, including a DVI digital output for digital TVs so equipped. Last year, DirecTV chose DVI as the output of choice for its receivers. DVI's greatest benefit is that it's cheap to install, unlike IEEE 1394, which can add a lot to a product's cost. The liability is that you can't record a DVI video signal; its data rate is far too high for any foreseeable consumer recording format. (Some manufacturers tout DVI as an uncompressed format. It does carry a denser datastream than an analog or IEEE 1394 link, but the extra bits do not enhance the quality in any way. A high-definition signal routed via DVI has no more resolution than that which came over the air/cable/satellite carrier.) The Sony receiver includes a DVI cable said to cost about $20. The Zenith does not.

I've been reviewing DTV receivers for more than four years now, and I've never seen a perfect one—a box that combines topnotch reception (a highly variable capability) with a complete feature list. Samsung's attempt at this, the SIR-TS160 high-definition and DirecTV tuner, reviewed in the February 2003 issue, offered a near-perfect feature set but mediocre performance as an over-the-air digital receiver.

The SAT-HD200 remedies the two most glaring weaknesses of Sony's earlier product: Like all current DirecTV receivers I've seen, it has no fan, which means it's perfectly quiet. And it not only has aspect-ratio control, it has the best iteration of the feature I've seen in a receiver box: eight different settings for viewing 4:3 material on a 16:9 screen, or vice versa.

Both receivers under review here output any analog or digital signal you want: 480i, 480p, 720p, or 1080i. (The older Sony box didn't support 720p, the display format for ABC's high-definition programming.) In both products, the output format is selected on the front panel or from the remote. This is an improvement for Zenith—you had to reach around behind their older receiver and pull a switch to change output formats. The Sony version offers several settings that allow the receiver to convert any incoming signal to a specified output format, a bit of flexibility the Zenith HD-SAT520 doesn't offer. That's probably the biggest difference between the two receivers—though the older Sony HD100 offers the same feature, and I've never found cause to use it. Others, with different equipment configurations, may find it useful.

Both the Zenith and Sony omit what I consider to be a very important feature: the ability to use the box to control programmed recording on a VCR. The previous Sony's recording capability was clunky and inconvenient, but it worked, as I found out during two years of use. The new box offers no way to record DirecTV or any other programming—unless you turn the VCR on manually when the program starts. (You can leave the receiver turned on and tuned to the desired station, then program the VCR to record automatically, but that's not as nice as controlling the process from the receiver.) This will be a disqualifying omission for many shoppers. The older Zenith had no recording capability either, so the new one offers no change.

As is usual for Sony and Zenith, the onscreen menus are slick and easy to use. The Sony's setup menu comes up automatically the first time the box is turned on, and it runs you through the setup parameters to integrate the box into a system. With the Zenith, you have to call up the setup menu, though once you get there, it's identical to the Sony's. Like most of their peers these days, these receivers let you receive DirecTV, analog and digital over-the-air signals, and cable programming, and all of these program choices are displayed in a single menu. The setup system detects all program sources when the receivers start up the first time, then builds complete program guides.

The program guide, described as DirecTV's advanced version, is attractive, versatile, and much better than the guide in the older Sony model. Zenith's earlier model came out later and already had an excellent guide. There are no differences between the program guides displayed by the two new machines. Each lets you see programming up to three days ahead, which would be useful if they also included the capability to trigger a VCR or other recording device. But you can ask them to remind you of an upcoming show, and you can arrange the menu to display only the shows you want—movies, sports, or names of specific shows, such as Star Trek. You can also set either one to show only movies that have certain MPAA ratings.

Sony's remote is nearly identical to the one that accompanied the SAT-HD100, but with two improvements. First, some of the buttons have been given new labels or functions, making it a little less confusing than the older remote. And the new joystick control works better than the old one, letting you move the cursor left, right, up, or down by pushing the stick in those directions. Pressing down on the middle of the button invokes Enter or Select. The problem with the older remote was that using the button as a directional control too often invoked Select when you didn't want to. It's possible that I simply got a bad sample a few years back, but no matter—the new one works much better.

Zenith's remote is also quite similar to the one offered with their previous model, and its layout is the best-designed of the two. Both remotes will operate other products as well as the DTV receivers, and neither is backlit.

The older Sony box offered two ways by which the remote and receiver could communicate: traditional IR or, in case the receiver was housed in a cabinet, RF. The SAT-HD200 doesn't offer RF. This means that both of the features eliminated from this box, the ability to automate recording and the RF remote, require additional equipment that would add to the receiver's cost.

Performance

I was able to judge the receivers' terrestrial performances as soon as I'd set them up. (In my experience, all DirecTV/HDTV receivers perform identically with satellite signals, and these are no exceptions.) How many digital stations could they find? The greatest attribute of the older Sony, the HD100, was that it easily found and displayed every digital TV station in my area, and without my having to adjust my rooftop antenna. The older Zenith was not quite as good.

The terrestrial performances of both new boxes were virtually identical to that of the older Zenith: Both found and displayed all six digital stations, but two stations weren't entirely stable and needed a bit of antenna adjustment to clean them up—not a big deal, but a step back for Sony. It's possible that, if I'd hung on to these receivers a bit longer—they came in close to deadline—their performance would have improved under different weather conditions. But the Sony HD100 didn't exhibit instability problems when I tried it under the same circumstances on the same day. Still, the performance degradation was slight.

The upconversion capabilities of both versions were about the same: pretty good. A few artifacts were visible on both when upconverting a 480i program to 1080i. And, as I've consistently seen in all such receivers, I was unable to see much, if any, difference between a 480i show upconverted to 480p and the same show upconverted to 1080i.

The performance of either receiver might be different in your home. Local conditions are very important in determining how well a receiver works. All that I, a reviewer, can offer is a common standard for judging the performance of every box that comes into my system. But what works in my house may not work in yours—or vice versa.

Conclusions

The Zenith HD-SAT520 and the Sony SAT-HD200 are fine products with excellent if not perfect performance and a great feature set—except for the lack of programmable recording. If you have any interest in recording standard-definition DirecTV or other programming, these machines are probably not the receivers for you. If you don't care about recording, the Sony and Zenith are both good performers. When choosing between them, price may be the only important difference.

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