My 622 Experience
Hey all, I have been enjoying my 622 for just over a week now. I'm located in Benton, AR (just southwest of Little Rock), so had my 500 changed out for a 1000 and my 511 for a 622. Unfortunately I was not here the Saturday the new system was installed (my wife was here and doesn't know enough to care about these things, just as long as they work).
At any rate, I wish I would have been here so I could have taught some HD connection basics to the installer.
I had an OTA tuner hooked up via HDMI to my Toshiba 34" HDTV, so I'll cut the guy a little slack for not hooking it up. He did manage to get my optical audio cable attached, but that was a simple swap-out from the previous DISH tuner. The real kicker was when I realized that he had used a standard RCA cable set (1 video, red & white audio) to hook up the component video connections on the tuner to the HDTV. I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or be pissed. I sorted everything out pretty quickly though, only to realize that the 622 was still set to output a 4:3 signal, which is quite funny to look at on an HD set.
Picking up the locals was quick and much less painless than it was with my Pro Brand HD3150Plus OTA tuner. Signals lock in quickly and stay locked in, even at lower signal strengths. I am very pleased with how well the OTA tuner performs; also, the channels were immediately mapped to the familiar channel numbers.
SD programming looks far superior than it did on my previous DISH 511, and I imagine that has something to do with the HDMI connection (I tested the component video as well and it is comparable to HDMI, but doesn't allow my TV to autoformat the picture like the HDMI connection does). HD programming looks great, for the most part. Exceptions to "great" include the World Sport station, for which some of the games are obviously downrezzed, while some look better, and the Kung Fu VOOM station, which is probably an unfair assessment seeing that all of those films are relatively old and the processing that goes into making them HD-compatible can result in some lackluster images.
My only complaint so far is that one of the tuners (I have the 622 set up in Single Mode) has some noticeable issues: SD content on some of the local channels pulled off the satellite contains some rather unpleasant popping noises and HD content can have (not always, but more often than not) herky-jerky images with a periodic skip in the sound. If I hit the swap button in either scenario and tune it into the same channel I experience none of this; I immediately hit swap to go back to the other tuner, and there it is again. Any ideas? This is going to drive me crazy!
Thanks for reading this far.