8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
Easy to use, fun to watch
Date of Review: Jun 21, 2004
The Bottom Line: This is a good product that is perfect for notebook users, especially if the computer is two years old or older.
After returning the ADS Instant TV USB tuner (read my review), I was reluctant, yet ready, to try out the WinTV USB (model 602) from Hauppauge. My wife wanted TV on her notebook for times when she is in her home office and Hauppauge is a respected company. To my surprise, installation was quick and painless. All you have to do is plug in the cables and load the drivers/software. No error messages or Windows crashes. Just the way it should be. The software then gathered my channel info. It took 10 minutes tops from when I cracked the seal on the box to when I was sitting back and watching Happy Gilmore on some cable channel.
Hardware:
The unit feels solid and is small enough to be tucked away. The supplied USB cord can reach across the desk with room to spare. There is no remote control, however there is an on-screen "remote" you can use. They also give you an audio cable (not required) and a Composite/S-Video adapter. One important thing to note is that slower computers 333MHz-MMX and above can use WinTV because it does not unload all of the digitizing work onto the computer. A 733MHz computer is recommend to do the software-intensive tasks. Finally, if you plug the USB cable directly into the computer you will not need a power cord. If you plug it into a PC Card you will need to plug the PC Card's power cord in. It would have been nice if Hauppauge had included its own power cord.
Picture quality:
Considering the fact that this tuner is a USB 1.1 device, I thought the picture is pretty good. Not as good as the internal ATI All-In-Wonder card that's in my PC, but it gets the job done. When the picture is less than half-screen size, it is mostly smooth with occasional blips here and there. The picture quality is best when it is kept in a small window, such as when you want to stuff it in the corner. This is how you would watch it a lot of time anyway. If you make it bigger than half screen the picture becomes fuzzy. Full screen mode is useless. So if full screen coverage is what you want, look elsewhere. Even though the box says video performance is the same for USB 1.1 and 2.0 ports, I found a very slight improvement when I plugged it into the 2.0 ports on my wife's PC Card.
Sound quality:
The sound is good. Note: If you have Windows XP and do not have Service Pack 1 installed, you may have a problem with the sound via USB (not using the audio cable). My wife's laptop hates SP1 so I uninstalled it. After doing so, there was a very noticeable delay in the audio when plugged into the USB 1.1 ports. After plugging it into the PC Card's USB 2.0 ports, which came with their own drivers, the sound delay went away. There is still a little fuzziness when an "S" is pronounced but it is slight and you soon forget about it. With SP1 installed audio was clear.
Software:
The software is robust, to say the least. It has many features and abilities. Besides the easy adjustments for picture, sound, etc, there are many tasks you can do. These include creating and editing MPEG movies, scheduling TV recordings, and watching video from a VCR, camcorder or video camera. You can also take still pictures of the video. I found the software to be intuitive. One thing missing is the ability to make the TV window see-through. As mentioned above, you can make the window small and stash it in the corner, setting it to Always On Top.
In closing, the WinTV USB is a good product. For picture quality, you will want to get an internal card if you have a desktop. For notebooks, the WinTV will give you TV and PVR capabilities without busting your budget.
By the way, my wife's notebook is an HP Pavillion ZT1135 with a 1.2GHz Celeron processor and 512MB of RAM. The screen is set at 1024 x 768.
