ATI Technologies Inc. HDTV Wonder
| Summary:
ATI Technologies Inc. HDTV Wonder |
 | Easy to install, not quite so easy to set up, but overall an inexpensive and effective way to get HDTV onto your desktop or home theater PC. | |
| Full Review:
ATI Technologies Inc. HDTV Wonder |
| Hardware install was a snap, just a PCI card; the software install was pretty difficult - the CD that came with the hardware didn't work correctly when installed, we had to rollback my computer using XP's rollback feature and download the latest drivers from ATI's site, which was a bit of a pain.
Once we had the software bugs behind us we were very pleased with the system. It did exactly what it was advertised to do -- tune in HDTV broadcasts -- and it (given our limited selection of stations) did this well.
The software itself was full featured and intuitive.
We also used the video input to capture a VCR tape to a digital file, and it looked fantastic.
Much better than any other video capture hardware we've used before (I think the last I tried was with Iomega's "Buz") |
| Expanded Ratings:
ATI Technologies Inc. HDTV Wonder |
| Design |  ( / 5 ) |
| The HDTV Wonder has a great design, with a simple add-on card and all the obvious cables included, even an aux RCA-video-in port. |
| Features |  ( / 5 ) |
| Features included an antenna, cable and OTA HDTV tuner support, software which autoscans the channels, and more. Overall a very complete feature set. Set up took longer and was more complex than it needed to be. We ran into some bugs and software issues that should be addressed. |
| Performance | ( / 5 ) |
| Unfortunately, we had limited OTA (over the air) HDTV signals near us to really test out the reception, but for what we did have it worked great. Also great as a Video-in device for other video sources. A lot of other reviewers have commented on the system requirements of this product. While it does have hefty requirements, if you try to run any high-performance product on a low-end PC, you're not going to get good performance. So we found that the HDTV Wonder hit all the marks performance-wise. |
| Value | ( / 5 ) |
| At about $200 street price, the HDTV Wonder did all we asked of it. |
| Total |  ( / 5 ) |
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