In North America we?ve been using the NTSC TV standard since before my parents or I was born. The standard, while it has held up through the countless years from the days of black and white antenna programming to the current day colored satellite TV and digital cable programming. While most people in the world don?t care about how good of quality their programming is, just as long as it?s viewable, the aged NTSC standard needed replacing. It has been around for approximately 50 years, while still going strong; it is being replaced by the next evolutionary step; High Definition Television, or HDTV for short.

After being in development since the 70?s and finally introduced in 1996 by the Advanced Television System Committee, HDTV has slowly gained acceptance in the US. HDTV is the next big thing in television since the introduction of DVD and 5.1 Surround Sound. When it was first introduced, HDTV compatible products costs were substantial and out of reach of most consumers, not to mention very limited programming made it very unappealing. Nowadays HDTV sets are affordable for most middle class families and programming is plentiful. As more local HDTV stations start to broadcast free over the air (antenna UHF) HDTV signals, it was only a matter of time before we saw mainstream PCI HDTV decoder cards become available.

ATI is hoping to cash in on consumers that want to experience HDTV but lack the funds to purchase an HDTV set but have a fairly decent computer system with a decent quality monitor. Being a company that ships HDTV decoder chips for most HDTV television sets, ATI is no stranger to HDTV products. Converging the world of HDTV with the PC, ATI has developed the HDTV Wonder; their first PCI HDTV decoder card. While ATI is not the first company to introduce a PCI HDTV decoder card; they are the first one to introduce a mainstream retail card. In the past there have been cards such as the My HD that carried a hefty price tag of approximately $300 and the Fusion HD card that cost around $150 for the bare card.

A closer look?

 

The HDTV Wonder is based around ATI?s very own NXT2004 that is found in various televisions sets including Sony Trinitrons. As the NXT2004 only decodes HDTV signals into an MPEG2 stream, it relies on the video card and CPU to decode the MPEG2 stream. As of currently, ATI only officially supports the HDTV Wonder for use with Radeon 9500, 9600, 9700, etc? Theoretically an NVIDIA and/or other graphics card should be able to work as long as it can decode MPEG2 in hardware with the proper decoder, ATI doesn?t support such configurations. For the TV Tuner, ATI has equipped the HDTV Wonder with a Philips TV tuner as they?ve done so in past multimedia products. The tuner has two coaxial connectors, one for an HDTV antenna, and one for standard cable and/or analog broadcasts.

The HDTV Wonder also supports the usual SVIDEO/Composite/Audio inputs via the standard purple breakout box included with their entire All in Wonder line. Remote-wise, the HDTV Wonder comes with the older Remote Wonder I. Though the RWII is their latest remote and offers more features and increased distance, the RWI has better ergonomics, though the mouse button lacks a bit.

Lacking from the HDTV Wonder is an audio output to loop back into the soundcard. Since HDTV streams utilize PCM or AC-3 audio data, the audio information is passed onto the sound card via the PCI bus, which alleviates problems some sound cards such as the M Audio Revolution has with line input synchronization. This preserves the digital stream and allows it to be outputted to a Dolby Digital receiver in its pure form.

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• A closer look... (1 of 3)
• Quality... (2 of 3)
• Conclusion... (3 of 3)