A Great Product
Written: Mar 10 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great quality, inexpensive
Cons: Hard to install drivers
The Bottom Line: Great sound and video quality and excellent features in software make this a great product. However, the hard to install drivers should be fixed.
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| Horizons832's Full Review: ATI TV Wonder |
I was so excited when I got my new ATI TV Wonder card. I immediately took it out of the box and looked it over, then I decided to put it in my computer. The hardware installation was very easy, and the card was detected when I restarted my computer without a problem. Following the instructions in the easy-to-use manual, I installed the software drivers for the card. When the drivers were through being installed, my computer restarted and I was ready to watch some TV.
The only problem now was that I couldn't. The TV Viewing program just appeared as a white window. In fact, none of the included software worked, and Windows reported that the device was not working and had been disabled. I removed the card from Windows, and restarted my computer, hoping that this time would be better. I reinstalled the drivers, and this time it worked!
The software scans for available channels and asks a few questions about the formats of your audio/video. After that, I was watching TV! The picture quality was excellent, just like a real TV, and the "Digital VCR" feature is very convenient. There are many different things you can have the software do, like remind you when your favorite show is on, or search the captions of the shows for something interesting.
The video capture feature produces good quality images, as does recording from the TV Card. The picture as well as the audio is very good quality, but can take up so much space that just 10 minutes can fill up your whole hard drive. There are many options for reducing audio/video quality when recording from your TV, so it's no problem.
Overall, everything is extremely easy to use and I've never had any other problems with the card or the software. The only downfall to the product is that it takes up a lot of memory. If you don't have a fast computer, then I don't recommend this because you'll probably only get "jumpy" images. My computer is a 450 MHz with 128MB RAM (not considered too fast anymore) and has no problems with any of the card's features.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 55
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Epinions.com ID:
Horizons832
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Member: J D
Reviews written: 25
Trusted by: 7 members
About Me:
I like trains
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