Hauppauge WinTV Go	ATi TV Wonder
ATi AiW Radeon 9000 Pro

    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.

GeForce 4 MX TV-in from Parhelia	ATi TV Wonder TV-in from Parhelia
MSI GeForce Ti4600 8X TV-in from Parhelia	ATi Radeon AiW 9000 Pro TV-in from Parhelia

    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.

    The quality of the cards is quite different, with the AiW getting a second place behind the Matrox Parhelia.  The quality of the text was purer and clearer than the G400 while the image test was a bit brighter and better saturated than the G400.  The Radeon 8500LE however didn't fair as well, as the 2D quality was worse than the G400 specifically in the text area, where there was a noticeable hue around the white text on the black background.  As we had mentioned in the previous review I was surprised at the 2D quality difference between the MSI MX 440 and the GF4 Ti4600-8X, especially on the white text on the black background test.

Parhelia TV-out	G400 TV-out
MSI 8888 TV-out	MSI GeForce Ti4600 8X
Radeon 8500LE TV-Out	AiW 9000 TV-Out

    As we look at the images, we notice that not all look exactly the same.  The same settings were used for all the images, and also the same video, but in the case of some of the cards, notibally the ATi based cards, the video does not take up the entire screen as it should.  Apart from these problems how is the video out quality?  Comparing the cards to our reference image that was shown on the previous page we notice some differences.  While the text on the reference image is sharp and aliased, the Parhelia does a good job of antialiasing the text, while not overdoing it.  The two ATi based cards do fairly bad with the text, as it is very blurry, with the AiW 9000 having a slightly worse text image here.  The image itself is nothing great with the ATi cards as there is the blurring again with the eyebrow, as well as some of the wire fence missing with the images from the AiW 9000 especially, but also with the 8500LE and the Ti4600-8X.  Overall with the TV-Out the AiW 9000 isn't that great, and needs a bit of work before it can be as good as some of the other cards.

Parhelia	MSI GF4/GF4 MX	ATi Radeon 8500/9000
No AA or Ansiotropic filtering	No AA or Ansiotropic filtering	No AA or Ansiotropic Filtering
	2X AA	2X AA - Performance
	Quincunx AA - Ansiotropic filtering	2X AA - Quality
4X AA + 2X Ansiotropic filtering	4X AA + 2X Ansiotropic filtering	4X AA + 2X Ansiotropic Filtering
16X FAA + 2X Ansiotropic Filtering	4XS AA + 2X Ansiotropic filtering	4X AA + 4X Ansiotropic Filtering
	4XS AA + 4X Ansiotropic filtering	4X AA + 8X Ansiotropic Filtering
	4XS AA + 8X Ansiotropic filtering	4X AA + 16X Ansiotropic Filtering

    We can see the 4XS mode of antialiasing is a very large improvement over the previous maximum AA setting of Nvidia based video cards.  If we look at the pictures of 4X AA and 4XS AA of the MSI card we see that this setting brings the image fairly close to the quality of the 16X FAA of the Parhelia, though it is still not quite as good as the Parhelia.  The 4X AA of the Radeon cards is similar to the 4XS AA of the GeForce 4 cards and smooth's out most of the jagged edges of the pixels.  The ansiotropic filtering of the Nvidia card is better than the Parhelia is in my opinion at the same settings.  With the improvement in ansiotropic filtering the quality of the MSI card increases more.  This can be seen by looking at the ground in the pictures, there is a noticeable difference between the 2X, 4X and 8X ansiotropic settings, as the ground looks much sharper and more detailed with the increase in the number of samples used to create this image.  With the ATi cards the increase of ansiotropic filtering does almost nothing to the image, but this could be because of the ATi's technique for ansiotropic filtering that doesn't quite work in this picture.  Though the original image looks better than either the GeForce 4 or the Parhelia, which helps ATi have a slightly better chance at having good quality.