Wonder - Ful
Written: Mar 21 '01
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Complete Tv viewing/recording package.
Cons: No FM. Recording requires a lot of CPU and hard drive.
The Bottom Line: It's a good solid product. Just remember you will need a very fast CPU and lots of hard drive space if you want to do any recording.
|
|
|
| egale's Full Review: ATI TV Wonder |
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 Hauppauge and Pinnacle card back and forth every once in a while but finally gave up.
Yesterday I installed the ATI TV Wonder. I was leary. I have had ATI video cards before and ATI drivers are bad. I have had a lot of system problems with their video cards installed so I was expecting the worst. I was pleasantly surprised. The card installed perfectly the first time. I did find that the documentation supplied with the card is very old and the card itself has been redesigned a lot since then. The pictures weren't even close. I still was able to figure out what plugged into what easily enough though.
After installation, the software scans for channels. The other two cards I had were about 90% accurate in finding current channels and not selecting scrambled channels. ATI found all but 2 channels for about 98%. After that, everything worked fine. Picture quality is better than either of my other two cards. Even at full screen picture quality is great. One nice thing about the software is that at full screen, controls are left on screen to allow you to change channels or adjust volume. It is a nice feature.
The card lacks a couple of features the other cards have which I never used and don't miss. First is FM. I never listen to radio at the computer and never set it up on the other cards. I don't care it is missing. Also, the other cards came with a remote control. Now, when I am sitting at the computer and am 6 inches from the keyboard or mouse, why on earth would I want a remote control to change channels when I can do it with the number pad or mouse? I never understood why they bothered to include it. Again, I don't miss it or care it is not there.
The ATI TV Wonder also comes with a Digital VCR application. It is easy to program a tv show. The only problem is that while recording, it uses so much CPU time that watching while recording yields a jerky picture. I have a P3 850 with 256 meg so this application is taking up a lot of CPU. I haven't played a lot with it but at it's best recording setting, each minute of recorded video requires about 47 meg of storage. An hour show will take up about 2.8 gig of hard drive space. If you don't have a large hard drive, you aren't going to be doing much recording. I am sure a lesser quality recording setting will use less CPU and hard drive but I don't know how much less and at what loss of quality. At it's best setting, the recording is as good as the original.
My machine is still stable so it looks like these drivers are going to work. I finally found a product that will do what I need.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 69
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
egale
|
|
Reviews written: 53
Trusted by: 9 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.