Product Reviews

While everyone's familiar with tellies, and most people have come across PCs, there's still something pretty big and clever about combining the two. Of course, there doesn't have to be anything gimmicky about providing TV on PCs, since your average monitor is miles better than a cheap telly.

Anyway, whatever the arguments for and against, Hauppauge have managed to produce a TV on a card for the low price of £99 (£116). Unlike some of their earlier models, the Win/TV pci uses your PC's PCI bus, and it's designed for Windows 95 use only.

Connecting the card up is pretty straightforward,

ADVERTISEMENT

and the manual has plenty of information, although this isn't quite as clear as it could be. There's no direct connection from the Win/TV to your graphics card, such as an external cable or internal feature connector, as the images are transmitted over the PCI bus itself. But for audio, you must simply connect the card's outputs to the line-in on your sound card.

There's only one application supplied (which is obvious, really), Win/TV. When you first run this, the program offers to scan for channels, although you can do this manually if you wish. The program then simply gives you all the usual TV controls.

The picture quality is fine (depending, obviously, on your reception), and the picture looked good right up to 640x480. If anything, the higher resolution of monitors shows how low-resolution TV pictures are, though, and things can look a little blocky close-up.

If you've got a comfy armchair in the same room as your PC, the Win/TV's ease of installation and low price make it one of the better excuses for not doing any work around. If you're not a news addict the Primio version without teletext is even more of a bargain at £79 (£116).