I just purchased an Ematic AT103B from Walmart yesterday. I'm quite impressed so far. I have both an iView and a HomeWorx and this one is much better. An important note: The box has a clear plastic film that covers the vents and must be removed. If left on, it most likely will overheat. Another issue is that the box gets its time from the PSIP info broadcast by the TV station. Some stations are pretty lax on keeping their time correct. If you want to record a show from one of these stations, you will have to manually enter a start and end time to compensate.
Below are comments about the Ematic from a user on Amazon.
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I couldn't find much information about this box in the description here, or by searching online, so I've put lots of info here which I've learned, that I would have wanted to know before buying this item.
The upshot: I'm pretty happy with this box, given the features and the price, and already have a few of them. While the ATSC USB PVRs are all nearly identical, I wouldn't ever even consider buying the IVEW or HomeWorx boxes. The only big complaint I have with this box (like all the rest of them) is that you're forced to watch the channel that's being recorded, and can't watch something else you've previously recorded. That is a huge annoyance for anyone using this as their primary DVR, and might just be annoying enough to make someone opt for a $200 Tivo, instead. Plus, conflict resolution is pretty irritating with a larger schedule. And most importantly, a couple *accidental* button presses can delete the HBPVR folder, and with it EVERYTHING you've ever recorded.
Before you buy it here, check wall mart's site, as they're often sold out, but otherwise may have this item for $30 with free ship-to-store. The first two I got were great, but I recently ordered more, and every last one of them had obviously poorer reception than my older units, and all had to be returned, so beware that the manufacturer may have made negative changes to this model.
* This DVR doesn't let you set Mon-Fri recordings... You must choose either 7-days, or just once a week. And this becomes problematic quickly, as you can schedule ONLY 30 EVENTS before it errors-out saying "Booking is Full". So you end up recording random junk on weekends, or can only schedule 6 weekday shows.
* No method of scheduled recording conflict resolution... You have to start deleting things. If you want to record a one-off movie that will interfere with something you've scheduled to record daily/weekly, you've got no choice but to DELETE the event entirely, and must recreate your schedule AFTER your conflicting event is done recording.
* Boot-up and shutdown is very fast, under 5 seconds, better than any other DVRs out there, and faster than your TV turns on.
* The LCD display is completely useless, and best covered with black electrical tape!
* Channel changing, and every other task is a bit slow and laggy, but entirely tolerable if you aren't expecting a very high-end device. Only FFW/RWD. No skip forward 30 seconds or similar button. You can seek to an exact time, but jump forward/backwards would be much nicer.
* OTA/antenna TV reception is good, perhaps just slightly better than my TV, and MUCH better than some very cheap and old HDTVs. HOWEVER, the 3rd box I purchased had lousy reception, breaking-up all the time, while sitting next to a previously purchased unit that was rock solid. Just a defective, but I have no way of knowing just how common they are, and YOU just might end-up with your first/only Ematic box being defective and getting terrible reception, thinking I'm a liar...
* Signal strength/quality meter unfortunately doesn't beep at all, making it a poor choice when aiming an antenna, but otherwise it works well, even showing signal strength on analog channels.
* The display size / aspect ratio selection option is extremely difficult to understand but with trial-and-error you'll figure it out, and there's no option to set it on a per-channel basis, nor a quick/easy button on the remote that will let you go through the different modes as you go from channel to channel. This is unfortunate.
* Cable / Clear-QAM reception minimally works, but it doesn't receive the PSIP or EPG information, unlike my TV. This makes the EPG/guide and INFO useless. This issue makes this box vastly less useful for cable subscribers, and I would suggest buying something else if QaM reception is what you need. You CAN still schedule recordings by manually typing in clock times, but that's no fun at all!
* Cable / Clear-QAM channels are randomly numbered (no PSIP), with stations like NBC7 actually found on channel 99-135. The channels can be assigned a name, so with lots of typing you can make sense of it all. Also, auto-programming will save all the encrypted QaM channels in the lineup as well, and you're left, stuck manually deleting several hundred blank channels, one by one.
* Digital and Analog pass-through/loop-through works fine, both when this box is on, and when turned-off, which is a common issue with other similar boxes from IVIEW and HomeWorx.
* The user interface is clumsy and inconsistent. In one sub-menu, you hit 4 to delete items, in another you hit 3 instead, and in yet another you use the EPG button. Why???
* You CAN record one channel, while watching any other sub-channels on the same frequency. So if you're recording channel 7-1, you can watch channel 7-2, channel 7-3, etc., without interrupting the recording. On an antenna, this may give you up to 9 channels to watch, and on cable could offer even more. But you can NOT enter the menu to change any options, nor EPG to see what's coming up next, nor watch any previous recordings without interrupting the current recording. You'll either get an alert that you're in recording or timeshift mode, or it will pop-up message asking whether you want to stop recording, and you can continue or cancel.
