The ATI TV Wonder is a PCI Add-on card for Windows 95 and 98. (It does not work with Windows 2000, an unfortunate fact I discovered after purchasing it.) It enables users to watch a television signal on their PCs, either enclosed within a window or displayed full-screen. It also adds VCR functionality, supporting real-time MPEG 1 capture both scheduled and on-the-fly. The tuner performs nicely, producing a sharp and nicely colored picture on up to 125 channels.
The card also presents a nifty way of channel surfing, presenting sheet of thumbnail images for each channel which updates periodically. Click one, and you are immediately tuned to the channel. And who says you need a remote?
The TV-Wonder is not perfect, however. One problem I found right off the back is that it is not compatible with all video cards. Your card must support a feature called overlay, which allows display to the screen without direct processing by the CPU. (I discovered this little problem when I tried to use the TV-Wonder with my Voodoo3 3000 card.) Also, the Multimedia Center Software provided with the card, in addition to controlling the TV function, is slated to take over all multimedia viewing functions in the system. This would be fine, except that the version of Multimedia Center included is significantly more primitive than suites such as Media Player, which is included with Windows 98. You can, however, manually control what files are associated with what program, so this really only represents an inconvenience.
All in all, the ATI TV-Wonder is a good solution if you want to watch and record television on your computer. So long as you have a compatible card, the price is right for entry level use. However, if you have a little extra dough and want more functionality, I would recommend going with the TV-Wonder's bigger brother, the All-In-Wonder Radeon. FOr the extra $200, you get a hell of a 3D chip, MPEG-2 Capture, and a whole lot more!



Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 79 from BestBuy