Review

Created: February, 2001

If your office is the kind of place where people need the television, not as a distraction, but as part of daily business operations, it's not always convenient to provide one screen that everyone can see.

Everyone normally has a computer monitor, so why not bring in a television signal on your PC?

With the ATI TV Wonder USB Edition, you can. This little red box connects to the back of a Windows-based computer via a Universal Serial Bus port, which appeared on most new PCs around 1997, so you can watch TV on your PC.

The TV picture pops up in a window on screen and can be adjusted in size from 160x120 pixels all the way up to a 640 x 480 pixel image. On a 17-inch
monitor, that is as small as a couple of postage stamps or as large as half a piece of letter-sized paper. The device can also make the TV feed full
screen.

When it's blown up, the image is a little soft and a tad blurry, but it's quite viewable.

To make all this work, you plug a coaxial cable into the device and it
then auto-tunes up to 125 channels with the included software. It also has jacks and an S-Video input to take a feed from a satellite TV converter, a VCR or any other composite video source. Of course, with a PC behind it all, the television experience becomes better. You can record shows to your hard disk in AVI file format or snap still images.

If you are recording, make sure there's lots of space available on your hard
drive. For example, during testing, a 45-second video clip needed 205 MB of storage space.

If you set-up the device with cable TV and you have an Internet connection, the ATI TV Wonder can also display program listings, just like you'd see in your weekend broadcast guide. This is useful because you can you use a detailed search tool to find out what's on days ahead of time and even set shows to record with the click of a mouse.

The system knows to display your local listings because you configure it
with your zip code in the US or postal code in Canada.

If you want to monitor what's on TV, the software package also can be set up to look for keywords in closed captioning feeds and alert you when they are found.

The device is not perfect, though. If you have lots of USB devices plugged
into your system, the ATI TV Wonder will complain, as it fights for power
and data resources.

A diagnostic tool can be activated when this happens to try to resolve the
problem, but it's not very user-friendly. Otherwise the ATI TV Wonder a
pretty amazing device.

Reviewer's rating: 4.25 / 5

Comments: It's not a perfect television experience, but the ability to
record feeds, surf the Internet and get dynamic program guides makes this
device well worth the investment.

Price: $99 US / $149 CDN
More info: www.ati.com
Where to buy: PC Mall

System requirements:
-Intel Pentium II, III Celeron or other USB-compliant PC
-Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
-Sound card and speakers
-Cable TV signal or amplified antenna
- Available USB port
- Interactive Program Guide requires Internet connection
- TV browser requires Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or later
- Windows 2000, Windows 98 SE, Windows Me