ATI TV Wonder 600 USB
Image Quality
As mentioned in our TV Wonder 650 Combo PCIe review, we said that image quality with PC TV Tuners is very subjective and can depend on how good the source of your material is. For example, the cable signal in our area is relatively weak. Because the coax cable signal is spread out throughout the lab, the power of the signal at each end is degraded, which can lead to noisy or unclear pictures. This noise is sometimes hard to notice on standard television sets, but easily becomes apparent when viewing the picture on a high resolution computer monitor. With that said, we took a notebook with the TV Wonder 600 USB connected right to it to a coax signal amplifier to gain access to the best possible signal for our analog cable screen captures. The digital antenna screen captures are taken using TV Wonder 600’s bundled antenna. The images shown below were running in full screen mode under ATI’s
Analog Cable
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Digital Antenna
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Digital Antenna - HD
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Even at full screen mode, the TV Wonder 600 USB delivered excellent standard definition image quality as can be seen by the pictures above. The picture from the digital antenna was a bit clearer than the analog coax cable, but the analog cable was impressive in its own right. However, most impressive of all was when we found HD programming on our OTA digital antenna. We caught a few minutes of both Jay Leno and David Letterman’s late night talk shows, with both shows looking excellent in HD. The HD content on a high resolution screen just looks great, so good in fact that it makes watching the great quality standard definition content a little less dazzling.
