Help select a TV tuner card under $75.

[scourge]

My wife's friend wants to buy a TV tuner card. I have a WinTV Go card and it suits me fine, but the picture quality isn't good enough for her. She wants it to be her primary TV since she's got a 25" monitor (I haven't seen it) of some sort.

There's a whole bunch of different manufacturers.
KWorld
Hauppage
ATI TV Wonder

Also, how good are the ATI AIW cards at TV? I've seen old AIW Radeon's for $55 and newer AIW Radeon 7500 for $69.

Any suggestions and/or helpful links?

Thanks!

[VHockey86]

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProduc...122-132&depa=1

Cant beat it for the price IMO. I've used it for a few months now, works great

[Xtreeme]

"Also, how good are the ATI AIW cards at TV? I've seen old AIW Radeon's for $55 and newer AIW Radeon 7500 for $69"

AIW are #1 at capture and tv tuning at the sub $100 range. Tuners can go for $400 alone of course are better. But in the "real" bracket the ATI AIW is #1 quality and performance. The overlay and all is hapening on same AGP card so no pci travel needed. Its results in 0 lag and better image. If this person is not into video games much the 7500AIW would be great choice. The origianl AIW-skip over the 7500 AIW is much better. If is into games the 9600 AIW would be best choice per $.

[DallasDon]

Looks like you are 2 for 2 on good suggestions.

I have the Leadtek, and if she is gonna watch TV on her monitor, it has lots of goodies in software, and an infared (line of sight) remote included. All the jacks are input, though, output is through the garphics card.

If she wants the monitor AND output to a seperate TV, the AIW is probably the way to go, VGA and VIVI outputs.

[Peter M]

TV picture quality is hardly going to get any better than what you get from that PCI card. The reason is that the TV signal in itself is extremely low bandwidth. You won't notice on a TV set, but on a large scale, quality computer monitor, you get to see all the jaggies and blurriness. (Same here, my "TV" is an old CAD grade 20" Trinitron. When you sit close, the image quality is unbearable because the monitor isn't blurring things enough to cover up for the poor image quality coming through the TV cable.)

You can make things noticeably better if you use a TV card that has pre-filtering circuitry. The best I've seen is the TV-in circuitry on ATi's All-In-Wonder cards. With those, even horizontally scrolling stuff like stock tickers become crystal clear.

[Xtreeme]

Good point on the native tv res peter. It will look a tid off as peter said just do to mon being so superior to tv. Watch a dvd on tv once then fire up the pc and play it. Ohhhh so much better on pc. Cause it (DVD) has a higher res to start with than normal tv broadcasts..one of which most older sets cant take advantage of. 1 tv pixel takes like 4-8 monitor ones to replicate. Do to the res. diff. The mon has many many more pixels. So they need to be grouped together to make the one large tv one. This does result in a somwhat blocky look when really up close. But the Tv wonder I have does a good job of hiding it. Better than most I have seen.