The New Theater 650 TV Tuner Solution from ATI

Image and Video Quality

Probably the most subjective yet important element of a TV tuner card is its ability to play and record high quality video. There are many factors involved in determining how good the video quality is and certain things like sharpness can be good or bad depending on user preference. That's why it's nice that ATI has added more user control over this and other aspects of image quality through the new software with the Theater 650.

ATI provided us with a DVD that contains some test videos to compare image quality between these three cards. To allay any suspicions of foul play, these test videos were created by SMPTE (the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) for the express purpose of testing analog television quality. These videos include still and moving images to test how well a tuner applies things like sharpness and noise reduction. We recorded all of the tests with each of the tuners to provide a consistent test video for comparison between cards, and you can download the complete videos using your favorite BitTorrent client. (Total size of the three videos is 345 MB.) Note that we used ATI's AVIVO utility to convert all of the files to MPEG-4 format from the default MCE .ms MPEG-2 format. This was done to reduce file size, and we did verify that there was no discernible change in image quality (the original files totaled over 1 GB in size). In order to avoid any errors in our own analysis, we used the original files while drawing our conclusions.

It is also important to point out that we didn't just run a DVD player straight into a composite video input. We ran our DVD player through a modulator set up to output on channel 3. This way were were able to provide each card with a source data in the same format as if the images were broadcast and recieved over a cable connection. Feeding in analog video directly would bypass the tuner and demodulator on the card and wouldn't present a full test of the hardware, but our solution gives us the ability to repeat tests easily using a reliable source. The images below are taken from the original video files.




As we mentioned in the introduction, ATI has improved their 3D comb filter with the Theater 650 over the 550 by making it motion adaptive. This means that moving objects will be much cleaner and sharper compared to those without this feature. As you can see in the above images, the fruit in the Theater 650 capture looks similar to the 550, but the color is cleaner, especially near the edges of the tomato. You can also see that the DualTV has some problems with displaying the edges of the tomato and stand properly while in motion. This is one case where we see a clear improvement by ATI over NVIDIA in image quality.




In the above images, we can also see how there is slightly more detail in certain areas of the test pattern with the Theater 650 compared to the 550, and both are ahead of the DualTV. The loss of detail is noticeable near the upper and lower right hand corners of the image where some of the fine lines tend to blur together. There are also fewer color artifacts with the Theater 650 due to its higher quality 3D comb filter.




As a final example, we can see the difference in the color between the Theater 650 and 550 in these images, and the 650 gives the woman's skin tones a better treatment. There isn't a very big difference here between the Theater 650 and DualTV but you can see how the colors are generally brighter on the Theater 650 due to the new automatic color control.

These are only some of the tests on the DVD (there are eight tests in all) which demonstrate the Theater 650's better overall image quality than the 550. From these results we can definitely see how ATI has improved over the 550 as well the DualTV with their new Theater card.