Hauppauge 1120CN WinTV-HVR-950 Hybrid Video Recorder by HAUPPAUGE
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Our Price: $299.99 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more digital camera details and other models |
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Digital camera reviews of Hauppauge 1120CN WinTV-HVR-950 Hybrid Video Recorder
Digital camera Review: Good but Good enough?
Summary: 4 Stars
Pros: Fair Price, compact, good video quality.
Cons: Poor instruction manual, Difficult to install software
I had very hard to installing the software on a vista unit (the box claims vista compatible, so ended up using Media Center. When connected to my Laptop image quality was near good. Issues include limited reception with the provided antenna. A remote control would have been nice and also lacks QAM. Compare to ON AIR GT!
Digital camera Review: Good buy for the price
Summary: 4 Stars
I purchased this TV tuner as a stand-in until I buy a new TV. It works just fine. It was pretty easy to install. I was watching TV on my laptop within 15 minutes of opening the package. I have a Dell laptop running Windows XP Pro, 1 GB RAM, USB-2 Port. I did not notice any slowdown in my laptop performance when I watched TV and opened other applications at the same time.
The picture quality is... well... as good as what you would expect for the price you're paying. It is a bit grainy for my analog TV signal, but perfectly viewable. The sound was OK too. For me, that was good enough.
I recorded some TV programs and played them back in Windows Media Player. Worked just fine. I have not used the ATSC tuner, so I cannot comment on that. But it seems people are pretty happy with the digital broadcasts.
All in all, this product delivers the goods.
Digital camera Review: Good enough...for the price
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought this on the Amazon.com Black Friday sale, so after rebates (which I hope comes through) it will be $34. That's not bad for an HD and analog tuner.
It comes with the USB 2 dongle (aka the tv card), a roughly 6 inch usb extension cable (which works wonders if your usb hub is jam packed with other usb devices, like mine), an antenna that receives both HD and analog, and this component cable that allows you to use this as an HD tuner on an HD tv. I haven't tried out the last one, so I cannot speak to its quality.
The picture quality on my non-HD monitor is great. I love watching HD football and HD programming (did you know there are four HD PBS stations in the Bay Area?!). I don't even bother with the analog stations anymore, but it is nice to know they are there. The video record mode is great, too. I recorded the Patriots/Giants game in HD and it was like watching it live, except I can skip all the jibber jabber and commercials. The last 3 quaters took roughly 1 hour. Downside is when I recorded at highest resolution, the 2.5 hours took up 17gigabites. But hard drive space is cheap these days and I deleted the video. And if you want to keep it, I'm sure there's a video encoding program out there that can shrink that down to something more manageable.
The antenna has about a 6 foot cable and I don't think most people know this, but the antenna can be pulled to extend up to about 1.5 feet tall. The antenna looks very natural at it's 5 inch "compressed" height, and the only reason I know that the antenna could be extended is because I wanted to pull the cap off, but the antenna elongated, instead. Reception is very picky on where you place the antenna, so have patience. If it doesn't work at all, you may want to look into an amplified HD antenna.
Terk HDTVa Indoor Amplified High-Definition Antenna for Off-Air HDTV Reception ^This one seems to have very high reviews.
A couple bad things:
-I tried installing this on Vista Ultimate with software downloaded directly from Hauppauge's website, and it was very confusing. They don't clearly label which file is for which version of tv card and which file the drivers are and which the program itself is in. Took a couple of tries before I got it.
-No Closed Captioning.
-I can't do screen captures, and the only error message is some vague 3 word thing that doesn't tell you how it might be fixed.
Overall, even at full price of ~[...], very much worth it for some HD.
Digital camera Review: Good hardware, crappy software - buy only if you are technically adept
Summary: 4 Stars
I purchased this for use with my XP Media Center 2005 machine to pick up Digital TV (DTV) over the air signals only - I was not interested in analog TV or Cable use.
Driver installation was confusing but I muddled through it. I have not been able to get the proprietary WinTV software working. I was, however, able to download and install the hardware driver and the Media Center encoder update use Media Center to watch TV - all using the included stubby antenna (which, by the way, telescopes).
Because of the difficulty I had with getting the drivers and software loaded, I would recommend this product only to the technically adept. Novices and Intermediates will be thoroughly confused by the software installation.
Digital camera Review: Good not perfect
Summary: 4 Stars
This product worked well to record tv shows but at times there were a lot of misses and ghosts of the people on tv. the scheduler is a nice feature to have and being USB bases is nice but this is not as good as the PCI based tv tuner cards out there.
The recorded image is much smoother then just watching the TV through the TV progam that is provided. Not really sure why the recorded picture would be better quality then non-recorded but it is.
this produce is not bad for the price and if you are using a laptop it is almost your only choice since you have to use USB but if you have a desktop and room for a PCI card i would go that way first.