Video-In Quality
If you buy a TV Tuner for your computer, part of what you plan to do with it is capture video. Even if you are just watching the video on your computer screen you still want the best quality picture that you can get.
First lets look at the quality provided by the tv tunem. All the images were taken within a few minutes of each other (as the time stamp on each indicates). The same cable was used in all three cases. This was live tv that was captured to HuffYUV compression at 720*480. The channel used was the weather channel for its repeatable video. So does the AiW 9000 Pro look compared to its older standalone brother the TV Wonder, or a low cost solution the Hauppauge WinTV-Go.
Hauppauge WinTV Go
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ATi TV Wonder
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ATi AiW Radeon 9000 Pro
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The differences between the three cards is very noticeable. The obvious weakest card is the Hauppauge card which has a limit of 320*240 for capturing, though the program used allowed capturing up to 720*480. The TV Wonder was much better than the Hauppauge card but suffered from a honeycomb effect, that ruins the look of the video. The AiW 9000 looks the best of all the tuners we looked at. It provided a clear image with constant color and clear text.
All video is not sent through the tuner, rather much video is captured through the inputs on the breakout box. Camcorders and other products use either, and/or both of the SVHS or composite video. So how does the video look when the source video is a DVD movie sent via SVHS cable from the Matrox Parhelia, which has some if not the best TV out quality I have seen (as we will look at next). In this test we have a few different competitors, instead of the WinTV Go, we have the MSI GF4 MX we reviewed, and the as well.
Reference Image
GeForce 4 MX TV-in from Parhelia
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ATi TV Wonder TV-in from Parhelia
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MSI GeForce Ti4600 8X TV-in from Parhelia
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ATi Radeon AiW 9000 Pro TV-in from Parhelia
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If we look at the quality of the images compared to the reference image we see that there is a bit of difference between the cards. The Ti4600 is the worst of the cards tested here, with over saturation in all areas which leads to missing elements in the video. The text of this card is aliased which is nice as it provides crisp lines, but it would have been a good idea to have some sort of antialiasing on the text. The TV Wonder has this odd honey comb shape on the picture which is rather odd looking. The video with this card also doesn't reach all the way to the end of the video, if we look at the upper right corner of the image. The GF4 MX looks very good here, and is a good image which we use to capture the TV Out images of the cards. The text is heavily antialiased, and as such looks smooth, though it can be a bit odd looking. The ATi AiW looks very nice, and is nicely saturated, with decent quality images though the image isn't perfect as it is missing some of the video, as again can be seen in the top right corner. The text on the AiW is good, not to antialiased but also it isn't too crisp. Overall the AiW has a slightly better picture than the reference image as well as the GeForce 4 MX, apart from the cropped video. However there is one problem with the video from this card, it has Macrovision protection, which means that the image below could be what happens to your home video that triggers the Macrovision copy protection.
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ATI All-In-Wonder 9000 Pro: ATi has been making the AiW series for the last several years. Today's review will look at one of ATi's latest but not necessarily fastest All-in-Wonder video card.
