Digital Trends

ATI HDTV Wonder

October 17th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Usage and Testing

If you've never experienced HDTV before, you'll probably be amazed once you tune in your first digital channel with the HDTV Wonder. Even — or perhaps especially — on a computer monitor, the difference in image quality between analog cable and HDTV is simply stunning, as the two pictures from the same scene in “Law & Order” show below.

Law & Order in Analog

Law & Order in High Definition

If you are lucky enough to get a few HDTV channels over the air you are in for quite an experience. Even though we were watching it all on a 19-inch flat face CRT monitor, the quality and immersive effects of truly digital television were enough to form a crowd around the test computer for a while. We tested the HDTV Wonder in the Albany, NY area which can get ABC, NBC, and CBS digital broadcasts. CBS was hardest to tune in but after some fine tuning of our antenna, we were able to view these networks with little problem. Our local Fox affiliate does not broadcast in HDTV yet — it is planned for January 2005 — and this was a letdown as we would have loved to check out the baseball playoffs in high-def. There were also a few other digital channels we were able to tune in, most notably PBS HD. Nature shows can be so much more interesting when shown in widescreen HD, and we found ourselves spending a lot of time watching this channel. ABC broadcasts Monday Night Football in HD and as the screen grabs below show, the images are crisp and highly detailed.

Recording HD works the same way with the HDTV Wonder as it does with the All-In-Wonder cards. ATI's timeshifting application allows you to pause and rewind both analog and HD programming. Of course high quality recordings or timeshifting will take up a lot of system resources and hard drive space. Our test system consisted of an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ Barton, 1GB of DDR and two different ATI Radeon graphics cards. The system was noticeably slow even with this setup and the HDTV applications running. Taking a screenshot would not only freeze the system for a second, but it would also interrupt the TV broadcast. If you want to watch HDTV and take screenshots or record in high-quality, be prepared to not be able to do too much else on your computer.

We also experienced setup problems with one of ATI's own video cards. Our first install used the Radeon 9600 All-In-Wonder as the video card. The installation went fine and we had the latest Catalyst drivers for the card, but HDTV playback performance was quite poor. In the configuration options of ATI's Multimedia Center there is an application that tests your system to make sure you have the right software, drivers, and compatible hardware. This test showed that our video card was not a supported card and suggested that we use an ATI Radeon video card. Of course we were using an ATI Radeon card. Perhaps this has something to do with the All-In-Wonder version of the card but we've never had a problem using the 9600 All-In-Wonder with any other TV tuner cards, such as the Hauppauge WinTV PVR250. When we swapped the 9600 All-In-Wonder for a Radeon 9800 Pro, the card was recognized as a supported card by the application. This, however, did not eliminate performance issues as video and sound would often get choppy or freeze when using the HD tuner. It seemed that when we turned our antenna around to point towards the location of our local HD broadcast towers performance improved. Just putting the antenna near or at a window doesn't seem to be enough — it should be near a window and pointing towards the towers. This may not be possible for some users though. Keep in mind also that you can't just get a partial or weak signal with HD. Analog TV broadcasts may appear washed out or show interference but still be watchable with a poor signal. A poor signal in digital TV means no image at all. It's either on or off. This means that if you are able to tune a digital station in, you will see it in all of its high-def glory, but if you aren't able to get a good signal, you'll get choppy audio and video and frequent freeze-ups.

Once properly tuned, we only really had HD problems when recording, taking screenshots, or changing channels. Simply watching HDTV worked rather well, but changing channels would often freeze the system and there seemed to be a display bug associated with it. For instance, when changing from channel 17-1, the PBS HD channel, to 10-1, the ABC HD channel, it would show that we switched to channel 10-1 but then the display would show that we were on 17-1. It would freeze for a few seconds — sometimes even minutes — and then eventually tune in 10-1. The display bug happened almost every time we changed channels, but only a few channels would actually freeze the system. We were also annoyed by the unlock icon — used to show if a channel is locked for viewing — which appeared on our full-screen DTV image. This did not appear all the time and we really can't tell you how to turn it off. It seems odd that a channel would show that it is unlocked because logic would say that if you are viewing it, it must be unlocked.

The analog cable tuner was not without its problems either. On several occasions we had problems with the sound being choppy while just watching analog cable. A shutdown and restart of the ATI software would often fix this, but sometimes it required more than one restart of the software. This really shouldn't happen with the relatively powerful system we were testing with.

For more high definition samples, click on the performance tab and link located above and below this review.