ATI TV Wonder 600 USB

At first glance, the ATI TV Wonder 600 USB resembles more a USB flash drive than a TV tuner. The tuner is roughly the size of a credit card and has an antenna / cable input on one side and USB 2.0 connection on the other. The USB connector is hidden by a cap that is removed when you are going to install the tuner into your PC . The device also features a mini port for its video in connections and an infrared receiver for the bundled remote control.

We put the tuner side by side with a stick of Kingston’s HyperX DDR2 memory and as you can tell from the picture, the tuner is about two thirds the size of the DDR2 stick. The TV Wonder 600 USB comes with a credit card sized push button remote control that worked well up to around 10 feet away from the tuner. Also included is a digital OTA TV tuner that is capable of bringing in HDTV and digital TV stations if you're withing broadcast range.

For analog video capturing, the TV Wonder 600 USB includes a dongle that includes the standard red, yellow, and white RCA inputs as well as an S-Video input. Due to its large size, the TV Wonder 600 USB will typically hamper the installation of any other USB devices to surrounding USB ports if it is plugged in directly into a USB port in your notebook. To get around this, ATI has also bundled in a USB port extender, allowing you to plug in the TV Wonder 600 USB to the extension which then plugs into the USB port on your system.