Entered CNET Catalog: 11/29/2006
SKU: 6288968
Manufacturer: Vista View
Manufacturer description
The Vista View Saber 2020 Dual Analog PCIe TV Tuner Card turns your computer into a dual PVR. The dual tuner gives you complete flexibility to watch and record TV. You can record all your favorite shows, watch them when you want to or record them to disc. You can record 2 shows simultaneously or watch one show live while you record the other.Product summary
The good: Dual analog tuners; excellent image quality.
The bad: Stripped-down software; no remote control.
The bottom line: If you're looking for a dual analog TV tuner and have an open x1 PCI Express slot, the Vista View Saber 2020 offers the best image quality we've seen.
Editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 12/04/2006
The Vista View Saber 2020 is a low-profile card with two coaxial connections for TV and FM radio and a port for connecting a two-input S-Video breakout cable. The card supports a variety of common TV standards, including NTSC, PAL, and SECAM.
Installing the card was easy using the setup CD, which included basic drivers and a custom DVR application called SaberView. The card also works with Windows Media Center Edition and third-party apps, such as SageTV. While you can use a standard MCE remote if Media Center is your front-end application, the card doesn't include a remote for use with the bundled SaberView DVR application.
SaberView will appear very stripped down to anyone used to Media Center, SageTV, or Beyond TV. There's a lack of hand-holding while setting up your TV signal, and the interface has a sparse Windows Explorer look, unlike the icon-heavy 10-foot interfaces common in other DVR apps. Still, for basic viewing and recording of a TV or FM radio signal, it suffices, and it gives non-MCE users a fully functional DVR setup right out of the box.
While using a PC-based TV tuner always involves certain compromises in quality, we found the image quality of live and recorded programming to be excellent, with no discernable difference between the live and the recorded signals. The card's onboard hardware encoder handled two video inputs simultaneously, without any stuttering or slowdown. The overall image quality meets or exceeds that of our previous favorite TV tuner card, the ATI TV Wonder 650.
Remember that you'll need a free x1 PCI Express slot to use the card and that, unlike your cable-company DVR box, you'll need two different signals to use the dual tuners (to watch one show while recording another or watch two shows at once with picture-in-picture). Also, note that Vista View has fixed some initial bugs with driver updates, and you should download the latest drivers before installing the card.
