ATI TV Wonder

Pros: Good value, all cables included. Easy install, good software.
Cons: Requires fast system, drivers should also be updated.

If you're like me, working your way through school, you're computer is often more important that your TV. You spend quite a bit more time with it at least. So after finding myself in a new apartment where I was unfortunate enough to be without a...

Pros: Functions well as a TV and recorder, relatively cheap
Cons: TV at full screen must be viewed several feet away; Drivers can be tricky

As a college student who is trying to save space in the dorm, I thought that a TV tuner card would be a cheap and easy way to get TV in my room without having to buy a seperate unit. Although the TV-wonder doesn't match the quality of a regular TV, it...

Pros: Fills a need where there previously was none; good price
Cons: Nitpicky with system config. Memory hog.

When I owned an i486 system, I had purchased a Reveal TV-for-PC, at a significant cost. That card was worth hours of enjoyment. As time wore on the Reveal card did not work on any upgraded system. Time passed as it usually does, and the ATI TV-Wonder...

Pros: Beautiful picture, low system requirements, clean capturing, inexpensive, and versatile
Cons: finicky installation, not enough documentation, and saves to proprietary format

I paid $44 for the Tv-wonder VE (value edition). Installation was simple, but there were things I had to figure out, like that I had to disable Norton Antivirus for the software to install, and what "composite video" really is. But I figured it out....

Pros: Complete Tv viewing/recording package.
Cons: No FM. Recording requires a lot of CPU and hard drive.

This is TV card number 3 for me. First I had a Hauppauge WinTV. Their software was good, picture was bad. I switched to a Pinnacle PCTV Pro. There picture was good but their software and technical support is horrible. I played with switching between the...

Pros: Great quality, inexpensive
Cons: Hard to install drivers

I was so excited when I got my new ATI TV Wonder card. I immediately took it out of the box and looked it over, then I decided to put it in my computer. The hardware installation was very easy, and the card was detected when I restarted my computer...

Pros: Inexpensive, nice smooth TV/Cable viewing on your PC
Cons: Extremely tricky setup, I never got more than simple TV viewing to work

I bought this card to allow me to watch TV on my PC. Let's face it, watching TV on your computer is just neat. Unfortunately, simply watching TV is about as far as I got. Installation of this card turned out to be too much for me, and I'd like to...

Pros: Product availibility, Cost
Cons: Poor Tech Support, Rude Customer Service, incompatabilities, Extremely Difficult Instructions, Outdated Software

Just like everyone else, I love Epinions. I really like the reviews from other people about certain products. I read pretty good reviews about the Dell Dimensions 8100 series computer, so I ended up buying one (and I love it!). Well I decided to buy a TV...

Pros: good quality picture (windowed), simple to use, affordable
Cons: poor full screen quality, ATI slow to release updates, diagonal lines?!!!

Recently I hit on the idea of adding a TV tuner/capture card to my PC with the goal of creating Video-CD (VCD and SCVD) disks to view on my family room DVD player. There are a number of TV programs that I enjoy watching and keep tapes of. So, I thought,...

Pros: Really Good TV Tuner For the Money
Cons: Can Slow Down GREATLY at times, Lack of ASF Codec, Installation Pretty Tedious

I got this for my birthday a few months ago. After a few tries to get it in correctly, i finally got it working without a hitch. The installation was a little tedious, especially since the drivers took so long to extract from CD. When I got it into...

Pros: Decent picture, MPEG-2 capture, GuidePlus
Cons: Poor drivers, prone to crashing

Sigh...another disappointment by ATI. What looked like a very promising card turned out to be nothing but headaches for me. It's a great card when it works, but be ready for some serious hair pulling when things go wrong. I've been working with this card...

Pros: TV on PC, record video, video snapshots. New Drivers fixed incompatibility problems(April 10/03)
Cons: Finicky drivers (resolved), GeForce incompatibility (resolved), XP unfriendly (resolved), Soundblaster Audigy unfriendly (resolved).

Here I sit so broken hearted, paid a dime and only.. oh wait, this is a hardware review -

**ATI has since fixed all problems, if you want to skip my rants head to bottom**

Like many people I bought the ATI TV Wonder PCI due to the...

Pros: a useful card for the money.
Cons: Software installation is involved. Audio line out is noisy.

Update: May 12, 2003
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With the release of their new MMC 7.9 in April 2003, ATI has taken significant steps towards improving their software. I've bumped the rating from 2 to 4 stars for this reason.

Using this...

Pros: The card comes at a very good price.
Cons: Well, the card didn't work.

I decided to buy a TV card for my daughter's PC to allow her to watch TV in her room while saving space by not buying a separate TV. Well, that's what I intended to do. I saw the ATI TV Wonder VE card in the store for 49.99$ with a 10$ mail-in rebate. So...

Pros: Ok for watching TV, preview panels good
Cons: bad for recording video

Had problems right out of the box. The video card configuration does not match the documentation - instead of the S-video connector on the card, it is now on a cable with the A/V jacks. CD was for Windows 95/98 only - not XP. Downloaded the lasted driver...