Sunday, August 28, 2005

The ATI TV Wonder Elite ($149) has it all covered. A surprisingly complicated chain of technology is necessary to achieve this amount of functionality at this level of quality, although it is all ultimately transparent to the end user, with a very user-friendly interface to boot. The TV Wonder Elite (TVWE) is also designed to work seamlessly with Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.

The TVWE delivers quite simply the best-quality analog television images we've ever seen on the PC, rivaling the performance of true high-end home theater gear. It is the only add-in TV card with a motion-adaptive NTSC/PAL 3D comb filter, as well as a superior 12-bit video decoder for a more lifelike picture. Everything, including PVR'd content, looks better with the TVWE. Full on-chip MPEG-2 encoding (both audio and video) handles the recording, which results in better sound/picture, but this on-chip approach also gives your CPU a break. There's also 16 megabytes of memory to ensure full framerate recording plus natural-looking noise reduction, and all this without a heatsink or fan, for those who worry that a "Home Theater PC" might be too noisy for the living room! And to remove all doubt, this is the only PC TV tuner product certified by the notoriously particular folks at the Imaging Science Foundation.