Rating: 
Summary: Exceptional Price
Review: I was very pleased with this purchase. I was skeptical becuase the price was so low. Upon receiving the prodcut, I was immediately impressed. The installation took 5 minutes and couldn't have been smoother. TV resolution is great and the image/video capture quality from an analog camcorder is acceptable.I do agree the user guide is a little anemic but it is enough to get you started. Installing this card and getting it to function with your TV/camcorder/VCR does require some technical saavy and could have been detailed a little greater in the manual. This flaw, however, is more than offset by the price.
Rating: 
Summary: There are better choices than PCTV
Review: On the plus side, the hardware is an amazing value. When it works, it's kind of cool. In theory, it will work with most modern VGA interfaces without any special video cables or connectors. It would have been nice if it had built in audio support instead of depending on your sound card. Perhaps that would eliminate the high pitched noise I get during a capture. Beware that this card will be replaced by the PCTV Pro which supports stereo and FM radio. The Pro seems to have been available in Europe for several YEARS so the US seems to be a second class market for this company. Also the Web site is a real disaster for driver updates. Just visit the user forum and see the mass anger and dissatisfaction. Why do I know this? Because my PCTV frequently crashes when scanning for new channels. Granted I have played around with a lot of video drivers, but why can't reinstalling their drivers fix driver problems? If you have a very clean, brand new Windows 98 installation, it will probably work better for you, but do you want to dedicate a PC just for this card? Then there's software, without which of course hardware is useless. The card comes with a CD that has 1.01 software. The TV viewing sw is very poor. 1.03 software is better but Pinnacle makes it remarkably difficut to get. One of the things I most want to do with this card, now that I have a big hard disk, is use my PC as a VCR. Their VCR functionality is quite lacking. I am so dissatisfied that I just ordered an ATI TV Wonder along with an ATI Fury Rage Pro. ATI seems to understand the value of VCR function and their VGA card has special hardware support to provide high quality video capture and play back, as well as DVD playback. I didn't get an All In Wonder because I want to upgrade to a DTV card when they become available. ATI's Fury line is the only one I know of with iDCT and motion compensation and these features make a big difference in handling video. Because Pinnacle does not make VGA cards, their software does not use any hardware acceleration even if it is available. I also suspect they do not want a low end product like PCTV to be very good at video capture or it would hurt the market for their $1,000 and up products.
Rating: 
Summary: Good video capture but lousy software
Review: The .avi file produced with Studio PCTV can not be recognized by Avid Cinema v1.5 although they can be played in the Microsoft Media Player.
Rating:
Summary: Pinnacle Systems: One of the worst hardware companies
Review: At first I was very excited about getting my new Studio PCTV. When I opened to box I was suprised to notice that the hardware wasn't very protected. It could of been EASILY damaged in shipment. Second I noticed how thin the manual was. Installation was rather easy, but I should be getting to the point. THIS HARDWARE DOESN'T SUPPORT VOODOO3 3DFX! DON'T LET THE DOCUMENTATION FOOL YOU, IT SIMPLY DOESN'T BELIEVE THE DRIVERS ARE INSTALLED. Upon the pulg and play window, I popped in the CD. I was forced to manually find the files on this foreign CD with no documentation on where to find these files. Accidently pressing a wrong button, the system went crazy and corrpupted all of the files agian. I had to reinstall all of the Studio PCTV software once agian. Then agian... Once I got to the third installation it figuered I had done it, but I had not. The realization is simple. #1. This hardware is cheaply made for the cheap price which is understandable. #2. The software is BADLY written. I've seen better on my IIgs. It crashes very often for no reason, forcing a restart and loss of all work. #3. THERE IS NO SUPPORT FOR THIS PRODUCT. As far as I know of there is no webpage in the manual. #4. I beg you, if you are looking for video capture PLEASE get something else. Please don't make the mistake I did. Now I have to go through the whole process of returning this piece of junk. I hope you'll understand this.
Rating:
Summary: A steal at this price
Review: I just installed the PCTV card into a PIII system and it works great. Both desktop tv and video capture are excellent, drivers were installed without any problems. It's not professional, but who cares - for the price of a computer game you get a full tv!
Rating: 
Summary: Studio PCTV a Great Buy!
Review: Everything pretty much worked the first time through, but the included software for capturing is pretty basic. Doing TV viewing and video capture seems to work really well, though, once you get everything figured out... :) I'm running with a Celeron 466, 64 MB, and a Viper V770 Ultra, if that helps.
Rating:
Summary: No support
Review: I bought this card to capture video. Watching TV is ok but on 3 computers, the PCTV Studio locks up and shuts down the system. I can not capture video and I tried for a week to get support from Pinnacle. No support other than the online support which is not helpfull. I own a computer consulting company and none of my employees or myself could get this to work. It is junk in my book.
Rating:
Summary: Good Software Ok quality
Review: Althogh it has **GOOD** software I have seen much better quality what would have made me not care about quality is if would have came with better software like Avid Cinema. The Price is ***AWSOME***. If you buy this TV tuner card then you should also buy Avid Cinema!
Rating:
Summary: PCTV almost ready for prime-time
Review: I've just bought the PCTV and have noticed some bugs in the software. You can watch TV just fine with the card, but the included Studio software will not run on my system without crashing. I haven't been able to capture a single clip since buying this card. I'm a systems tech., so I have some idea how to troubleshoot PC problems, but after checking out Pinnacle's msg. boards, I'm no closer to figuring out what's wrong. There may be a problem with DirectX 7.0. A co-worker who has almost an identical system (except he has DirectX 6.1) has no problem at all. This rings true for most of the people on the msg. boards, also. I bought this card mainly to watch TV on my PC, so the capture problems don't affect me too greatly, but if you're buying this card to primarily capture video, be aware you might run into some problems.
Rating:
Summary: Great Product. Well worth the money.
Review: This was an easy to install product. The drivers were simple to load and once I re-booted my machine it worked flawlessly. If you have an extra VCR laying around you can plug it in to the antenna jack and utilize the remote control for true tv experience. The S-Video jack is a big plus. I plugged in my Hi-8 camcorder and was able to make quality digital captures.
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