ATI launches TV Wonder 650 OTA HDTV tuner
By Richard Lawler 
posted Aug 21st 2006 8:43AM
posted Aug 21st 2006 8:43AM
ATI is trying to make catching OTA HDTV broadcasts on your PC a bit more mainstream with the TV Wonder 650. This add-in card not only picks up high definition broadcasts, but includes Avivo technology for image enhancement on analog broadcasts, motion-adaptive 3D comb filter, noise-reduction and hardware-assisted MPEG-2 encoding. The included high-def PVR software will record content in DivX, H.264, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and WMV9 formats. This card seems Vista-ready, as they also mention combining it with ATI videocards to enable 3D menus, in addition to the MulTView picture-in-picture technology (requires two tuner cards) and the ability to have a translucent video window over other applications. While it isn't the OCUR CableCard device you may be waiting for, if broadcast HDTV is all you need this could be a great pickup for $129, shipping today. 
I own the previous HDTV Wonder and I was waiting for a long time for something better from ATI. I would have picked this up 6 months ago, but I just recently got Dish Network and a VIP 622, and I'm getting my HD that way. If this card had a cable-card option (and if cable cards were at all mainstream), then this may make sense, but getting OTA only is pretty lame these days when you can go with Dish and get 35 HD channels.
Where can I buy it? I have an ATI Theater 550 PRO chipset in a PCI-E card from PowerColor, it's a great tuner and I have been looking for an HDTV tuner lately now that I have a widescreen monitor and 500 GB. This seems like a great card to go with my current card.
Nah. I'll pass and wait for the dual HDTV ATSC tuner Cat's Eye 164e to hit the shelves. It has already been in production for a while, OEM mfg got the first batch, and resellers get the next.