ATI TV Wonder 650 PCI TV Tuner

ATI Wonder 650 is a good TV card.

Strengths: Easy to install software and hardware, low profile card, doesn't miss frames

Weakness: Price, it was over $100 but I got it on sale.

I bought a Wonder 650 card some months ago after a bad experience with a TV card from a company called KWorld. I bought it so I could watch TV while using my computer and convert some old VHS tapes to something I could put on a DVD. I found the hardware installation to be easy as all you need to do is install it in a empty PCI slot. The card is low profile so it should fit in most computers. The...

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Not bad

Strengths: Great hardware, free over the air HDTV

Weakness: Price, software sucks with not much support

I gave it 4 stars because once you download the driver from the website instead of using the included cd it works great. I used beyond tv 4.5 instead of the included software because the included software is lacking features. Beyond tv works great with this card, I can put the over the air hdtv and regular cable all in the same channel line up instead of switching between the analog signal and...

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great tuner but worst software

Strengths: dual tuner that can tune both analog and digital signal

Weakness: no QAM (cable based digital signal) support

Based on ATI's latest Theater 650 Pro processor, TV WONDER 650 has made a great improvement from its predecessors, such as TV WONDER 550, HDTV WONDER. The biggest difference from the ATI HDTV Wonder is the hardware encoding for analog TV (the quality is much better than the software encoding found on most hybrid TV tuners such as the HDTV Wonder). But this doesn't mean it has two tuners. Actually...

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ATI Wonder 650 is finicky but works

Strengths: good picture quality, good performance, works as specified, tv picture can be a transparent window over other applications, so you can watch TV and do other work on the computer simultaneously.

Weakness: Finicky as to compatibility, Titan software updates slowly, requires powerful computer setup

The ATI Wonder 650 is a good choice for those that want to build their own PC based personal video recorder to replace a Replay or TiVo machine. The physical installation requires the simple insertion of a PCI card inside the computer case. That is the easy part of installation. The hard part is the software installation. I had to put it in 3 computers before it worked. The first two computers...

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Extremely buggy but good when it works

Strengths: Picture and sound are great when it works.

Weakness: Bugs. No HD recording compression - 6GB/hr for HD. Only one tuner band can be used at a time - you cannot flip through analog and digital channels easily. Cannot manually program channels.

OS: WinXP Pro. System: Intel Celeron 2.93 with 1GB RAM, Video: ATI Radeon 7500 and/or 9100 Integrated. When it works, this card and included software produce awesome OTA HD picture and sound. The tuner is as strong as that in my HDTV. When playing back recordings, the sound and images are much better using the included software than using something like windows media player. However, the card and...

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2 tuners are good for the money

Strengths: 2 tuners - Analog and Digital Analog comes with h/w encoder

Weakness: two tuners can't run at the same time you can run just one of them. Doesn't work with any antennas amplifiers MMC doesn't show names for all HDTV channels as result EPG doesn't work right

I used that card for 2 days so far. After one day I found that all tuner issues were due to external antenna amplifier. I tried to boost my OTA signal with RadioShack and two Philips amplifier - as result I got some problem with resulting video, but my HDTV with ATSC works just fine with all those amplifiers. I was not able to get all HD channels names in MMC as result MMC can't get EPG for all...

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Does not meet expectations

Strengths: Box looks very nice.

Weakness: Box description does not meet any expectation.

ATI Wonder card is lame technology with a nice wrapper at best. To bad there are not any "product Police" to get rid of high flash low delivery products. In the end consumers have to buy and try before getting the real details and then are left with junky products. ATI is now at the bottom of my brand name trust. So, if you buy this product what you will get is: a low resolution box on your...

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Average

Strengths: works

Weakness: will not replace a home set top DVD Recorder

The 650 does record and work but the picture will never compair to my Pioneer DVR640HS the picture is crystal clear on the pioneer, the picture on the 650 wonder is lower than VHS quality i am sad to report, this really has bumbed me out i wish it would record super clear maybe it is how i have it hook up i don't know.

ATI Wonder 650 a disappointment

Strengths: size, supports standard TV and broadcast HDTV (but not at the same time), easy to install

Weakness: poor picture, runs a little hot, a early revision was recalled make sure to get the new revision

I bought 3 ATI Wonder 650 cards to replace the 3 Hauppauge PVR-250 cards that I had been using in my HTPC. The Wonder 650 cards were supposed to provide substantially better picture quality on SDTV (standard definition television) than the PVR-250 according to all the reviews I read. But when I installed them I didnt find the picture quality better, instead I found it to be worse. I did a totally...

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Tunner that is over price

Strengths: good quality

Weakness: only the same feature as the ATI 550

well i bought this to upgrade form the ati 550 and the truth is this product is over price the free remote is a con cuz there is no in stock and the 50% off the MCE is overprice too cuz you can get it at newegg after for the same price even after the ATI discount customer support never reply you i send an email few days ago .. and there is not even reply to tell me that i will be taken care of....

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