Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Product With a Couple Tweaks
Review: At first I was worried about this product due to the reviews it recieved. In my experience with the card thoguh, I have actually found it's preformance excellent. First off, people complain of the quality of the image. This is called a cable signal, you can't expect your computer to magically make it better. If you ask why it doesn't look so bad on your TV, there's a simple answer, go sit right next to your TV and tell me how it looks. In the room my computer is in, I have a comfortable seat about 8 feet from the computer screen. The image looks perfect in full screen from there.
The second problem that people stated with this card is that there is an audio sync issue. This is very easy to solve, it's all in the setup of the computer. This is not an ATi problem, but rather a windows problem. When the cord is plugged from the back of your TV card and into your sound card, it goes in the microphone jack. Here is where most people have the problem. To process the cable image takes some time from where it comes in, therefore the image is delayed. Most people experience either the sound being early, or an echo. I have seen several reviews where the stated solution for the echo is to mute the media center. This is what creates the delay. ATi media center delays the audio to match the video perfectly. Mic thru speaker needs to be disabled in your audio pannel. This way, the programs get the audio signal, but the signal doesn't go through your speaker.
A+ work on this one ATi, sorry everyone who didn't know until now, but there's the fix, it's in the instructions, it even has pictures.... there you have it.
Rating: 
Summary: Make sure you have an ATI Radeon graphics chip FIRST
Review: ATI does not call out that fact you MUST have an ATI Radeon graphics chip on your computer until you run the diagnostics and it happily informs you that you should buy one of their graphics cards. This is NOT in any specification I have seen beyond the diagnostic message. I returned the ATI TV Wonder Pro card at that point. Then I noticed Kathy (see other reviews)had the same problem. ATI is doing themselves a disservice with this as I am not buying any of their products in the future. Also, I am going to first read ALL the Amazon reviews on a product in the future! I would make this a MINUS 5 star rating if I could.
Rating: 
Summary: Product with an equal amount of praises and flaws.
Review: I got this card for christmas when it was on sale at Best Buy for around 50 dollars. I had read a few reviews saying installation was a pain, but I had no problems what so ever.
The quality is decent on a Dell Dimension 2400 with 512 mb of ram and 2.6 Celeron processor. You can definately see the downgrade in quality when you go into full screen, but it isnt terrible. I have a Radeon 9250 256 MB PCI card and it was far better than I would have expected on a PCI card.
These pluses are brought down by the numerous flaws. First and foremost is the software like everyone else stated. While I got the through the installation fine, the software that comes with it is outdated and it crashes from time to time, while the recording portion of the software completely messes up the program all together. The options are fewer than expected IMO, but that might be to the fact that I had higher standards. The menu interface is a bit clunky and since this is the no remote version, it is a pain haveing to be next to your comp to change channels.
The biggest downfall to me though is the built in 125 analog tuner. While I can understand why it is only 125 channels and accepts analong signal only, I feel as if I am being cheated in some way or another. With the emerging world of Digital Television, this program will become somewhat obsolete when all the good channels are either switched around or go to Digital.
In the end though, I was pleased and both disappointed. While the former prevailed a little more, the latter is enough to bring the product to a sturdy 3 stars.
Perhaps, ATI will make their future TV tuner cards digital compatiable for the new generation.
Rating: 
Summary: Same problem (Why I didn't red the reviews before bought it)
Review: I had the worst 2 day of my life trying this #$%$& card work.
The quality is so poor and I tried to fix everything. Finally, reading the reviews I realized that it's not an installation or a computer problem, it's a product problem and an incomplete description from ATI for the system requirements.
BIG BIG DISAPPOINTMENT.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Product
Review: I have a Pentium 4 1.8GHz PC and it works great for me. The manual said as long as you have a graphic card that is complient with DirectX 9.0, then the product works.
I am not giving 5 stars because a couple software issues. But they can be resolved easily.
1. The GemStar TV Listing software does not install automatically with the installation CD. You have to install the software manually.
2. When you select the best video quality setting, the audio can go out of sync.
The issues are documented on the ATI website.
If you have a large HD, you can record TV shows in MPEG2 format and the quality is pretty decent. This is a great alternative to getting a DVCR which is probably 8 times the cost at the time of this review. Considered the price and the features provided by the card, it is a great buy.
Rating:
Summary: Went flawlessly
Review: I was kind of worried when I read reviews on how this didn't work with video cards other than ATI. (I have an 128MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200, which is a fairly common card.) I recieved this TV-Wonder card as a gift, so I was about ready to ask to return it without even trying it. However, I decided it wouldn't hurt to try it out since they still returned opened defective hardware.
And low-and-behold, it worked! Despite building my own computers, and feeling that directions were below me, I followed them carefully as to not ruin the experiment. I probably would have done a few directions out of order, so that was a good idea.
In the end, I suppose people still have problems with it, probably with different video cards. All I can say is, it works with the Nvidia FX5200 card I mentioned above, and to follow the directions, carefully and treat the card like a holy grail while taking it out of the box.
Rating:
Summary: Works great
Review: I've read some bad reviews of this card but I guess I got lucky, it works like a charm for me. I've got a WinXP Home system with Celeron 2.6 ghz processor, 512 meg ram (emachine). Anyway, it works great. I can record analog video straight to DVD quality and my processor only jumps up arond 60-70% when I do it. The 'DVD' quality isn't really DVD quality, but the video format can be burnt directly to a DVD blank without re-encoding. (FYI: you can't get real DVD quality on the fly, you need a good encoder like tmpgenc and encode raw AVI video)
The guide plus+ software works great too and makes it really easy to schedule something to record. I like to record stuff on the computer and then just dump it to a DVD-RW disc (no more re-winding tapes!) and watch in my standalone DVD player. I usually select SVCD (one of the recording options) because I can record lots more video at that level of quality, and it's still as good as VHS.
Best of all, after rebate, it was only $30 at Bestbuy!
Rating:
Summary: Decent product
Review: It works pretty well.On the other hand the setup was a mess (I'm using Windows XP). a) The CD that came with the hardware didn't have the same folder/directory structure as described in the manual. Had to browse and locate the XP drivers myself.
b) TV viewing and recording worked pretty well the first time, but the captured images had a totally green tint (red objects appeared black, so somehow "R" was missing from RGB signals). At first I thought the hardware was defective. Really freaked me out.
c) ATI.com had downloads for a newer version 8.8. I forgot to uninstall the CD's 8.2 first, and 8.8 didn't recognize 8.2 and got everything mixed up. Eventually had to uninstall both 8.2 and 8.8 and reinstall 8.8 (Urgh). Anyway, after all this, it started working pretty well. Picture quality is decent. Video encoding works well on my humble P3 machine. The software is not great but okay with me (I just want to watch TV and occasionally record and capture stuff so what do I care). The user interface is not very pleasing to the eyes by the way. For $65 it's a pretty good bang for the buck. I would give it 5 stars if it weren't for the trouble I had. I'm gonna burn a CD myself and keep it for downloaded 8.8 stuff instead of that sorry CD.
Rating:
Summary: bad, bad, bad
Review: the installation software and manual that came with it were extremely unhelpful, and wouldn't actually install anything, so I had to find newer software on their website. Finally got it working and it has bad, flickering video quality. A day wasted trying to get it to work right.
Rating:
Summary: HORRIBLE , JUST HORRIBLE!
Review: THE SOFTWARE IS THE WORST EVER!!! To be honest I dont even know if the card is good or not because of the damn software!! Everything installed softly until Multimedia Center started installing...the installation process just closes itself right in the middle of it..I tried EVERYTHING!!! went on ATI website, uninstalled all my current ATI drivers and software and reinstalled the newer ones still NOTHING , called customer support i did EVERYTHING they mentioned and still Multimedia Center DOES NOT WORK!!! Unless you feel like staying up til 5am trying to get this stupid software to work I reccomend this to you! Please, PLEASE dont waste your $50 on this unless you have a good Radeon card...
|
