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

Fourth Place: AVerMedia M150

The AVerMedia M150 is an OEM TV tuner that ships with many MCE PCs, but is identical to the retail AVerMedia 1500 MCE.  The M150 still uses an analog Philips tuner, but there are no real issues with going that route. 

The image quality of the M150 is actually fairly difficult to discern from the third place TV tuners of this comparison in all but one aspect: text display.

The overall picture looks reasonable...

The M150 actually displayed the worst example of artifacts in text effects of any of the cards in this roundup.  You can see a perfect example of that below:

Not so good - these sort of artifacts should not be present. The text itself is legible, but everything around it is distracting.

Other than the text issue, the picture quality of the M150 is pretty decent for a SD tuner.  A big issue we found is that regardless of how good the tuner happens to be, the absolutely poor quality of SD cable made it very difficult for one tuner to hold an advantage over another.  The biggest differences between many of these tuners happen to be in their handling of text on the screen. 

The AVerMedia M150 can be found for around $60.