Digital TV Goes Mainstream: TV Wonder 650 Review- Page 2/6
October 13, 2006
By
Thomas Soderstrom
Hardware
The TV Wonder 650 resembles our formerly reviewed TV-Wonder Elite, except that it's longer, darker, and has a smaller tuner cover. A half-height PCI card, it does not include the shorter mounting plate required to fit nicely into certain "slim desktop"-style home theater chassis.
The TV Wonder 650's namesake chip, the Theater 650, offers all of those great features found in the earlier Theater 550, plus updates to the 3D Comb Filter, Edge Enhancement, Motion Compensated hardware noise reduction, Multi-Stage/Multi-Speed automatic gain control, refined automatic color control and VBI Splicing. This combination of enhancements promises truer colors, smoother images, sharper details, better brightness control and lower CPU utilization.
Officially specified to use the Theater 311 VBS demodulator, our review sample used the Theater 312 with several minor alterations to its printed circuit board. If anyone wants to tell us why, feel free to drop a line.
I/O ports include an ATSC/FM antenna input, cable TV input, and ATI's usual A/V "break-in" connector.
ATI includes the manual and quick start guide, driver/software CD, a warranty sheet, support contact card, an FM wire antenna, and an S-Video/Composite video/audio "break-in" cable with Velcro mounting tape. Rather than include its own remote in every box, ATI offers users a choice of a free ATI Remote Wonder or a 50 percent reduced-price voucher toward the purchase of Microsoft's Media Center remote.
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