Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I got this item off of Woot a few weeks ago, and it's been sitting in the box/clear plastic casing until today. So far (after 3 hours or so), it looks good. The card initially did not like scanning for over-the-air channels without an external antenna, but when I ran out to Best Buy to get one, it was appeased. I've since disconnected the antenna and returned it to Best Buy, and everything seems to be OK. I guess it just wanted an antenna to be present at the get-go, and then it doesn't bother checking again? Maybe I just did a mis-configuration during the initial install; I can't blame the manual on this one, as it was (shockingly enough) well-written and easy to understand. One thing I noted is that scanning for channels is definitely worth the wait for the Best Quality mode. It takes *forever* (especially scanning for over-the-air HD), but you will only get the channels that look good (no fuzzies, for example). If you don't care much, then Quick and Normal are both fast, but Quick obviously won't search as "hard" as the Best Quality and Normal modes will.
The software that comes with the card is OK. It's a bit confusing at first, but a little bit of looking around and playing with it has sufficed for me to learn it. I have managed to get some strange errors when trying to set Favorite Channels; I think a developer somewhere needs to check his code. I had to uninstall/reinstall to fix it (hence the 4-star rating). Recording is good (I've not seen the lack of sound/picture mentioned in a previous review), but it is highly system-dependent. I believe the minimum requirements for HD recording/viewing are a gig of RAM and 2.8 GHz on the processor; I meet the RAM requirements but only have a 2.4 GHz proc, but it still works fine.
The remote is sound...after you connect the receiver to the card. Don't do what I did and expect the remote to work right out of the box (well, after you put in the batteries); it won't do anything, and you might think it's broken. Once the sensor is installed, though, it works great. Being able to channel-surf from the comfort of my computer chair is hard to beat ;)
It's also got a built-in radio tuner for both Internet radio and radio-radio. I know that this isn't a hard thing to do, but it's nice. Sometimes you just want to listen to the radio instead of watch TV, especially when that game you want to follow isn't televised and you have to listen to it over the radio instead. It's a nice touch on the part of Pinnacle.
Overall, I'd recommend this card. I've used products from Pinnacle before and found them wanting, but they seem to have gotten this one right. Not a bad buy!
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