Final Words

Just to state the obvious, the image quality will be influenced by your hardware and signal quality as well as the type of signal you decide to use.

Analog Signal

Above is a local news broadcast over an analog OTA signal. This picture was captured using the included antenna with the GT. You'll notice the "normal" analog issues such as the ghosting. Without moving anything, we switched from analog to digital...

Digital Signal

Like night and day. The digital signal is much clearer with none of the drawbacks we're accustomed to with analog signals. Keep in mind that digital does not automatically mean HDTV. Many of the big network shows broadcast in HD, but even then the quality in HD will vary. That said, here is a screenshot of HD in action from this past weekend on CBS:

Unlike satellite or cable HD, OTA HD is fully uncompressed. What this means is the picture quality should be better than subscription based HD. The downside of uncompressed HD is that if you have plans of recording this type of video, be prepared to have a lot of disk space used. the included OnAir software, a mere 10 second capture used up 25MB of disk space, 30 seconds eating up 57.3MB. For a 60 minute show, you'll probably use up about 9GB of space. However, the picture quality is simply amazing. Let's just say with LOST premiering tomorrow night, it's going to be quite an experience.

Another thing to keep in mind is HD decoding is very CPU intensive. While NVIDIA's PureVideo is fairly efficient, we've tested TV viewing on these platforms, all using 1GB of ram:

	CPU Usage
Acer Aspire 3000 (Sempron 3000+)	30% to 35%
IBM Lenovo T60 (Centrino Duo 2GHz)	15% to 25%
Desktop PC (X6800)	11% to 18%

Anyone with dual or quad (or coming soon tri-core) should not have any issues with HD on the GT. Originally, we experienced a lot of dropped frames on the single core Sempron, but a video driver update corrected that issue.

As we've stated earlier on, the OnAir USB HDTV-GT is geared more towards the mobile crowd but if you're home or HTPC has access to a good sized antenna or cable box, the OnAir USB HDTV-GT would be a great choice for those setups as well. The GT is incredibly easy to setup and the software is also very easy to install and does so without a half dozen reboots. Unlike some competing products, the GT includes an antenna while still allowing for other signal inputs without much fuss.

There aren't many drawbacks to the product directly. CPU usage can be high, and disk space will get eaten up quickly if you record in HD, but that will be a problem for any HD tuner on the market. Otherwise, we found the OnAir USB HDTV-GT to be an excellent product. The hardware is solid, and the software tools are also very good, especially the SNR meter. We found the size small enough that the GT is truly portable. Unlike PCI based tuners, you can unhook the GT and move it around to other PCs. With that in mind, we have no problems recommending the OnAir USB HDTV-GT for anyone looking for a mobile or stationary ATSC/QAM capable tuner.