Digital Home Thoughts: Review Of ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 - External TV Tuner

"It’s been pretty lean pickings for laptop owners and technophobes interested in watching television on their PC. Whether you were a technophobe that was unwilling to open up your PC, or a laptop owner who didn’t have that option, you were forced to purchase an external PC TV card. The connecting USB 1.1 technology employed in these devices to get the TV single from the tuner to the PC, simply wasn’t fast enough and all the compensatory compression technologies that were designed to get around this didn’t do a very good job ... Thankfully this is all about to change, because we have a TV Tuner based solely on the revised and much faster USB 2.0 format, meaning compression is no longer an issue and now - thankfully for many novices - neither is the need to rummage around the internal workings of your PC."



You can get the ATI external TV Tuner for under $100 and it looks like laptop owners finally have a quality TV tuner, and one that can take advantage of the USB 2.0 standard. The unit comes with the Theater 200 chip, and has an onboard Video Processing Engine (VPE). ATI claims that this is its fastest onboard chip to date and improves upon the 9bit analogue-to-digital converters (ADC) used in its previous VPEs by using dual 12bit ADCs. One other cool feature is that a single button press will allow you to capture a still image and save it for you.