Digital Trends

ATI TV Wonder Elite

March 1st, 2005 | by Ian Bell

Video Playback

We saved the most important part for last of course — video playback. In one word “Amazing”. We originally saw the TV Wonder Elite being demonstrated at this years CES, but since we were under an agreement with ATI, we could not say anything until this review. Trust us when we tell you that we are not fans of analog cable or over-the-air broadcasts. If we had a choice, everything we watched would be 1080P, but since we do not lived in a perfect world, we have to make due with what we have.

The irony of the Media Center PC is that you pay thousands for a computer capable of so much multimedia, but which is limited, because of standards and laws. We would all love to be able to watch and record HDTV broadcasts using our Media Center PC, but it just isn't mainstream yet. Fortunately ATI's TV Wonder Elite helps to make things a little easier to swallow.

The Theater 550 Pro chip used in the TV Wonder Elite does a great job of cleaning up the incoming signal to make the image look cleaner. For our tests we used basic cable from Comcast. The TV Wonder Elite was able to eliminate the majority of the artifacts that were visible when compared to our older Hauppauge WinTV card. Edges were not nearly as sharp as we were hoping for and images appeared to be soft looking as a whole — which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Color is fairly accurate and we did not notice any excessive reds, greens, or blues. The 3D comb filter which the Theater 550 Pro chip uses does an excellent job of preventing any colors from bleeding outside of the image edges, and text is very sharp and easy to read — even while scrolling across the screen. Overall, the TV Wonder Elite makes you feel like you are watching a typical satellite feed instead of an analog cable broadcast. We can confidently say this is one of the best looking TV Tuner cards we have seen.

Hauppauge WinTV on the left, ATI TV Wonder Elite On the Right

Hauppauge WinTV on the left, ATI TV Wonder Elite On the Right

Starting up the PowerCinema software takes some time and can feel very sluggish while changing channels and using its recording features. We are not sure if this is a trait that can be associated with the TV Wonder Elite itself or the software. Our test system which includes 1GB of RAM and a 3.0GHz Pentium 4 processor is more than powerful enough to run the TV Wonder Elite.  Our guess is that it's the combination of the remote control, the USB receiver, the PowerCinema software and the TV Wonder Elite itself. Somewhere in the chain something is slowing the whole process down. The good news is that it's tolerable.  We have seen this slowdown with other TV tuner cards on the market, so it's not limited to the TV Wonder Elite. Hopefully one day we will see a response from the PC that is similar to a standalone TiVo or set-top-box.

Programming a show to be recorded

Recorded shows saved on your PC

We could probably do without the ATI version of PowerCinema since it feels so incomplete on features, but we realize that ATI has to package some sort of software with the TV Wonder Elite. If you already have Windows Media Center Edition 2005, than use that instead and do not even bother installing PowerCinema. Otherwise, we would recommend spending the money to get the full version of Cyberlinks PowerCinema which includes an electronic program guide. Other options would be SnapStreams' Beyond TV or MythTV (for Linux) which are both very popular media software packages; just make sure the software supports the TV Wonder Elite before you buy it!