Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro Stick TV Tuner

Free HDTV without the TV

Strengths: Powerful HDTV tuner in a small compact design.

Weakness: Poor analog tuner and only one year of free program guide updates from Pinnacle.

This is a great product. Until laptop manufacturers build in an HDTV tuner and antenna into their products, you won't be disappointed with this external HDTV tuner. Just connect the tuner to the included telescoping antenna or your local cable via coax then plug it into any available USB 2.0 port and Windows XP will detect it easily. The software installation, setup, and updates take a bit, but...

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Pinnacle PCTV HD PRO STICK USB2.0

Strengths: great little TV tuner for computers (YAY HD), small, compact

Weakness: antenna pretty weak, software can be buggy

This little HDTV tuner is pretty impressive. Great for people in well covered over the air HD broadcast areas. +: Great for laptops (very small) Antenna has magnetic bottom to hold it in place also has inputs for digital cable (via coax cable), s-video, composite video and a digital audio jack. works with BeyondTV (besides remote) and other antennas. -: Magnet not good if near computer (Hard...

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OK, but not as portable as advertised

Strengths: Size, image quality.

Weakness: Requires lots of processing power

This is supposed to be a very portable device. For the most part this is true. It's biggest weakness, however, is that most of the processing is done by the CPU which requires large amounts of processing power. I just installed it on my laptop (HP with AMD CPU running @ 1.7GHz) and the application warned me that it could not display HD content properly. Analog was fine, but HD content was choppy.

Cool to watch tv on notebook.

Strengths: Very small, with additional audio/video input.

Weakness: SW does not support Vista

Software didn't run under windows vista, had to download a beta release from their website. With this beta release it works seamlessly. My note book Pentium 1.6 GHz, 1GB, Radeon 7500) has problems keeping up when using the timeshift function.

Great little device

Strengths: Size is excellent; truly portable unit with a nifty portable antenna, outstanding HD picture; analog picture is highly dependent on location and reception

Weakness: None so far, except it takes a very long time to download patches and updates from Pinacle website.

This device is one that truly does what it says it can do. I watched the football game (Bears vs Jets) on my laptop Sunday, it was an outstanding HD picture using the provided antenna. If you're in Chicago, as I am, you can count on about 10 HD channels, and all the analog ones. I'm sure that's more than in other parts of the country. The analog signal was kind of fuzzy, but that was an antenna...

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Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro Stick-USB2 HD TV Tuner

Strengths: Small Size; USB versatility; Good Picture; Easy install

Weakness: Software could be more user friendly.

Overall, a very good USB tv tuner and well worth the cost! I initially installed the tuner on a Compaq laptop running XP, celeron processor with 512mb, 15" widescreen. Installation was smooth and easy. I installed it using the supplied antenna and my local off-air channels in HD were of excellent quality! I next connected analog cable which didn't go as smoothy. For one, it's a 4.3 picture so...

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This thing is awesome

Strengths: Excellent video quality

Weakness: None

This product does exactly what it says. I have been watching very high quality HD on my laptop for a few weeks now. The channel scan turned up about 23 stations including 8 HD feeds. The quality on the analog channels is not good but all of the major networks are in HD or ATSC anyway. I can't say enough good things about this product. I watched the Bengals game on the back porch last Sunday!

my first hd tv tuner

Strengths: small compact easy to carry

Weakness: bad software design

The hardware design is perfect and small. It came with a small antena which receives analog and digital signal. The software is terrible and no good. Fortunately, the hardware works with BeyondTV software while I was having problem using pinnacle remote in BeyondTV4.

Cool if you like portable tv on your notebook.

Strengths: HDTV (ATSC)tuner SDTV (NTSC)tuner USB 2.0 device small size. includes a remote. magnet on base of antenna. the future is here, I like products like this. cool factor.

Weakness: If connected to a usb hub/usb pcmcia you need external power (AC). Otherwise the pinnacle pro stick crashes and disconnects from the computer. Pinnacle software has glitches. Needs powerful computer.

I had this product (pinnacle pctv hd pro stick usb 2.0) for about a month and a half and then sold it. It's a cool device don't get me wrong, but falls short of my high standards.:) It won't work on an old usb 1.1 port. Which is not a surprise. The remote won't work with Windows XP MCE, you need a different remote. The program guide from pinnacle is free for one year, and after that: who knows...

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Great when it works

Strengths: Good signal and great picture

Weakness: Stopped working after a couple uses, customer support has failed to even respond to the problem

I received this as a gift Christmas 2006. It loaded easily and worked great on a new Dell laptop with XP for a couple of uses. I did not use it for a month or so and when I tried it again, it would not work at all. I have uninstalled and reinstalled countless times per the instructions on Pinnacle's site. I have also tried to install on another new computer without any success. Pinnacle's website...

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