Buying a new Telly.

[conny]

We are thinking of buying a flat screen telly for the bedroom, wall mounted.
I've seen some with 'Freeview' and some with 'Digital Tuner' is there any difference?

Also, if we get one with built in 'Freeview' would we still need an arial on the roof or would an indoor loop one do the job,in fact, do we need any sort of arial at all?

As you may have guessed, I am not a big telly watcher.

Any help would be most helpful.

 

[mikeyd]

Digital tuner and freeview are referring to the same thing.

You do need an aerial still and it depends on how good your signal is.

I just have a loop aerial sitting on the floor behind my telly but I have direct line of sight to the transmitter.

If you get a good signal with analogue then you probably will not have any problem with digital. Having said that aerials have certain groups or bands which refer to the range of frequency they can pick up. Where I am all the old BBC1 to CH4 analogue channels were group A (lowest frequency) and everyone had an aerial to match, but CH5 came along and now some digital channels (multiplexes) are higher frequency so a wide band aerial is needed.

A loop aerial will be wideband but it's impossible to say if it will work, it just depends how strong your signal is where you are.

 

[conny]

Thanks Mikey,
got a loop ariel in the bedroom at the moment and it is quite good with a freeview box from Asda.
Might just get a basic LCD and get Virgin to put an extra box up there.
Once again, thanks for the info.

 

[ericmark]

Digital tuner and freeview are referring to the same thing.

Are you sure I thought we have DVB-T and DVB-S which are both digital tuners but DVB-T is used for Freeview and DVB-S is used for satellite signals.

DVB-T = Digital Video Broadcasting — Terrestrial
DVB-S = Digital Video Broadcasting — Satellite

There is also
DVB-S2
DVB-SH
DVB-SMATV
DVB-C
DVB-C2
DVB-T2
DVB-H
DVB-SH
DVB-MT
DVB-MC
DVB-MS

All are Digital Video Broadcasting and can be for cable, phone etc.
The DVB-T2 will be HD for Terrestrial.

Some TV's are now on sale with DVB-S and Satellite free to air boxes are becoming more popular as those designed as free to air boxes often have the ability to control the rotator too. But Sky boxes are fixed to just Astra.

And of course we also have DAB which is also a digital tuner but only for audio.

So Freeview uses a digital tuner but a digital tuner may not receive freeview it may be for one of the other systems.