Digital Trends

ATI TV Wonder Elite

March 1st, 2005 | by Ian Bell

Features and Design

ATI is touting the TV Wonder Elite as one of the first TV tuner cards to be certified by the Imaging Science Research Labs (ISF RL). Similar to the way THX certifies a home theater receiver for using specific components and having certain specifications, the ISF RL has worked in conjunction with Microsoft to develop an industry standard for video quality specifications for use with Windows XP Media Center Edition. This means that ATI's TV Wonder Elite is vigorously tested to comply with the exact audio and video quality standards set by the ISF RL and Microsoft. What this means to you is that you should have absolutely no problem getting the TV Wonder Elite to work with your 2005 Windows Media Center Edition PC, and it should give you a better picture than non-certified tuner cards; at least in theory.

The ATI TV Wonder Elite features full hardware MPEG-2 compression, a 3D comb filter and full personal video recorder capabilities. Bundled with our review unit is ATI's own Remote Wonder Plus remote control, the RF receiver, ATI's Catalyst software drivers and a special version of Cyberlinks PowerCinema media software. With Cyberlink's PowerCinema software, you can pause, rewind, and fast forward television broadcasts and even record a show for later playback. But what makes the TV Wonder Elite so special though is ATI's new Theater 550 Pro video chip.

The Theater 550 Pro is the first hardware accelerated video processor to support both PCI Express and PCI interfaces. In fact everything to do with video processing is hardware accelerated with the TV Wonder Elite. This means that your computers CPU is left alone to carry out other tasks, while the TV Wonder Elite handles anything related to watching television. The new integrated 3D digital comb filter is carried out by the new Theater 550 Pro processor and video is recorded and encoded in a low bit rate MPEG-2 format allowing you to easily record content to a DVD-R/DVD-RW disc for playback on your own standalone DVD player. The Theater 550 Pro chip also handles the audio associated with cable or over-the-air broadcasts and makes sure it syncs with the video side accurately. And lastly, the most important feature the new Theater 550 Pro chip must carry out is cleaning up the incoming picture. Using a special “noise reduction algorithm” the Theater 550 Pro will remove any unwanted noise and artifacts usually associated with the incoming signal and help to make the picture as clean and clear as possible. While the ATI TV Wonder Elite is the first product in ATI's lineup to use the new Theater 550 Pro processor, perhaps we will see similar technology integrated into future versions of the ATI All-In-Wonder line.