MCE TV Tuner Roundup: Featuring ATI's Theater 550 & NVIDIA's NVTV

Final Words

Without a doubt, our two favorites from this review are Hauppauge's WinTV PVR-250 and ATI's TV Wonder Elite, with the overall win going to ATI for the TV Wonder Elite.  If you're buying a card for your MCE system today, the TV Wonder Elite is the one to choose.  Or if you already have a MCE machine and you have the Hauppauge card, then you're also sitting pretty.  After hours of watching the same loop of CNN Headline news on these cards, the first and second place winners do offer a significant improvement in image quality over the remaining contenders - to the point where it is actually noticeable in day-to-day viewing.

The problem really isn't which card offers the best image quality, but rather how much money are you willing to spend for that last 5% of image quality - and here's where the decision gets tough.  In most areas, SD cable is extremely poor quality to begin with.  For many people, spending over $100 on a TV tuner just isn't justified to get an improvement on top of an already poor cable signal. 

More than anything, ATI faces a major issue with the pricing and the release timeframe of the TV Wonder Elite.  At this point, there's no excitement in yet another hardware MPEG-2 encoder, especially not one that weighs in at the top of the single tuner price class.  Although ATI has done an excellent job with the Theater 550 and the TV Wonder Elite, it may just be too late to make a difference. 

If you are less willing to spend money on a TV tuner (which is quite understandable), ATI's eHome Wonder and eMuzed's Maui-II PCI PVR are both excellent, lower priced alternatives.  The ATI eHome Wonder is actually about half the price of the TV Wonder Elite, which means that you can actually end up with a dual tuner MCE box for the same price as a single tuner MCE box with the TV Wonder Elite.

By the end of this year, Windows XP Media Center Edition is supposed to have CableCard support, which will enable complete HDTV support for MCE boxes above and beyond the disappointing limitation for only over the air broadcasts that's in MCE 2005.  Hopefully, this roundup will be a farewell to SD as we eagerly await the first HDTV tuners with CableCard support later this year.