Related Articles

Introduction

PowerColor has been one of ATI's premier partners since ATI loosened the reigns on who can build video cards around their VPUs. PowerColor has established themselves as a reliable alternative to ATI branded cards and generally they can be found with a better price to boot.

The last couple years has seen a resurgence in popularity with TV Tuner cards. Hard drive sizes have exploded, and increasing processor power meant fewer dropped frames as well as the ability to do other things while the computer is capturing video. Tech-savvy TV junkies have also latched onto more consumer friendly approaches like the TiVo and the whole concept of the PVR was born. Further nudges like the release of Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition are also driving PVRs and TV capture towards a more mainstream audience.

While ATI is well renowned for their video card technology, they are not bound just by the PC desktop or pushing 3D pixels. ATI has interests that expand into many areas of video display technology and graphics cards are only a single part in their grand scheme - it certainly surprised us that ATI powers a lot of HDTV set top decoders. We see ATI's technology in Nintendo's Gamecube and Microsoft's Xbox 2. Today however, we are still taking a look at a desktop PC product but it is not a high powered 3D accelerator but a TV Tuner card, specifically the PowerColor Theater 550Pro.

Box Contents

The Theater 550 card, a FM antenna, remote with batteries, a break out box that accepts RCA and SVideo input, software and brief manual is included along with an instructional DVD. The remote is Cyberlink branded unit instead of the RemoteWonder that is seen with the ATI AIW series.

Specifications and Features

• TV Input
• FM Input
• S-Video Input
• Composite Input
• Audio Input
• Hardware MPEG2
• 12-bit Video decoder with hardware 3D Comb Filter
• Hardware Noise Reduction
• Remote Control
• MCE 2005 Support

PowerColor has more detailed specifications available here. We'll try to put some of the technology jargon into perspective.