Don't know if I should stick this in here, Tech, or the HD forum.

My father just bought a new Samsung LN-S4692D. Great looking set. Went over my parents' house to help him set it up. He got an HD cable box from Cablevision, a Scientific Atlanta 4200HD. Bought a DVI->HDMI cable since the box only has a DVI port in the back, no HDMI.

Hooked it up. Get a message on the television that says "not supported mode." We put that aside for a moment and hooked up the box through the component cables, everything works fine.......except the only HD channel we get is ABC (which looks amazing). The other HD channels are garbled. We tried hooking it up through the DVI-HDMI cable again and got the same message. I gave up for today and told him I'll come over after work and help him tomorrow.

I looked up the 4200HD box and apparently there has been a slew of problems with it. Some cable companies supposedly don't support or have not activated the DVI port.

So I don't know if I'm overlooking something very simple or if I should just go get him a different box with an HDMI port in the back tomorrow. I already have an extra cable I can give him, so he can return the other one.

Any help is appreciated.

If your cable company offers a better box, fight for it. They are apparently all idiots. Took something like 3 tries for my dad to get set up properly, and he still doesn't have the best box they offer around here. But at least he finally got a functioning DVR.

It looks like that's what I'm going to have to do.

I got the DVI->HDMI setup working but it's still the same results. There are only a few channels coming in in HD and the rest of them are garbled and choppy. The only channels that come in well are ABC and ESPN. I still get the feeling I'm overlooking something simple on the tv or box settings, since he gets a few HD channels.

Can you get into the service menu? On our Comcast/Motorola HD/DVR/Digital cable box you turn off the box, then hold in the menu button I believe, and you can change how the cable signals work.

We had the cable guy come out when my wife's brother was staying with us, and the cable guy changed it so all my SD channels were automatically stretched out to 16x9, because the cable guy thought we were set up wrong. I had to ask here how to fix it.

There was just some setting about how it handled 480i vs 1080i in the service menu, and I changed them until it worked the way it did before.

Yeah, when the box is off you can hit the guide and info to get into the HDTV setup. It asks you what type of screen you have, 4:3 or 16x9. It goes into the picture formats then, 1080i, 720p, 480p, 480p widescreen, and 480i widescreen. You can select which ones you want. There's also the picture settings of auto dvi, fixed, upconvert 1, and upconvert 2. My dad's been trying random combinations of everything and still only getting ABC HD and ESPN HD. I'm clearly missing something here.

I know they're widely used, but overall, the Scientific Atlanta boxes are pure junk. I've had problems galore with the different ones I've had over the years. Sadly, it's the only brand Comcast offers to my area.

The more reading I do about them, the more I find that's the general consensus. I've been finding pages and pages on forums about people complaining about these things. Apparently the 4200HD is the worst of them all.

The only reason I haven't gone to a DVR is because Time Warner here only has Scientific Atlantic. All I read is how shitty these boxes are, yet that's all I see offered.

A little update.

Yep, it was the box. Went and picked up the 4250HD box from the Cablevision store today. Took all of 5 minutes to set up. So a little warning for everyone, stay away from the 4200HD box, get the 4250 and it'll save you a load of time and trouble.

Just thought I'd post about my experience with a Scientific Atlantic 8300 HD and a Samsung plasma. I was hooking the 8300 up HDMI to HDMI and talk about a hassle. Basically, you have two options when hooking the cable box up straight to the TV via HDMI or component in regards to the overall picture that is broadcasted.

The first option is using a HDMI cable and setting the 8300 to output in 1080i for every channel. If ya do this you get an incredible HD picture, no picture interference/distortion, and black bars on the sides of standard definition programming.

The second option is using a HD component cable and setting the 8300 to output at 1080i/720p/480i/480p. This will give you a great HD picture, but possible channel interference like lines moving up the screen, will stretch standard programming to fill the screen, and possibly cause lag when switching channels. One way to reduce lag is selecting the 1080i option but not the 720p so the picture won't adjust itself when switching between HD channels. Same can be done with the standard channels by selecting the 480p options and the 480i widescreen but not the 480i standard. That is if you want to stretch the picture to remove the black bars.

It all comes done to what you watch and prefer. HDMI will give you a great picture and no interference, but you will have black bars on regular 4:3 channels. I prefer this since I don't like people looking stretched. While component will give you a great picture and give you the option to stretch the picture for 4:3 programming to eliminate the black bars. Some people might prefer this as an extra measure to prevent burn in.

As mentioned above you can get to the HD options on the 8300 by turning it off and then by hitting guide/info. Then you hit A B B A I believe.

Hope this helps someone.