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CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
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Very good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 06/07/2006
- Released on: 06/06/2006
We should start seeing retail cards using the Theater 650 Pro chip in July, but ATI sent us a reference board that we hooked up, via a simple PCI slot, to a Media Center PC in CNET Labs. In our hands-on tests, the Theater 650 Pro was the best TV tuner hardware we've seen to date. The Theater 650 Pro boasts a new video decoder along with several picture-quality tweaks and performance improvements. Some of the highlights include support for NTSC, PAL, and SECAM signals, plus digital TV via ATSC and DVB-T (the European digital standard), and hardware MPEG-2 encoding to spare your CPU from doing all the heavy lifting.
Watching a standard TV signal, as well as sending DVD test footage from a set-top DVD player, we saw evidence of the improvements ATI made to the Theater 650 Pro. On a standard moire pattern test screen, we were able to see fine, detailed lines that were blurred out on last year's Theater 550 chip. On a video clip of moving patterns made up of fine black-and-white lines, we saw the expected false colors (like seeing someone in a black-and-white striped shirt on TV), but the color artifacting was less pronounced than we saw on the older 550 chip. Still, no TV tuner for a PC--the Theater 650 Pro included--provides the image quality you get with even the most basic cable-box-to-TV hookup.
The Theater 650 Pro ushers in additional changes; ATI's long-standing Multimedia Center software has been renamed Catalyst Media Center, and notable features include support for dual analog/digital TV tuner cards; a nice translucent video window effect, called ThruView; and the ability to record to a number of formats, including MPEG-4, WMV9, and H.264.
Many consumers will choose to use Windows XP Media Center Edition as their front end, and our Theater 650 reference board hooked right up to the Media Center OS with no problems. ATI claims the Theater 650 Pro will be compatible with Windows Vista, although the future introduction of CableCard (essentially a mini cable box decoder that will be built into systems) will make that a moot point for most people who are looking to make high-quality TV recordings on their PCs.
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