come_mon_come_mon! said:
Hi,
I'm considering buying a TV recording H/W for my PC and I'm interested
in Hauppauge's PVR product. As I approached a computer shop in my city,
the sales recommended me WinTV-PVR-150 and said this model is more
updated than WinTV-PVR-250 & WinTV-PVR-350. Is that true ?
3 models. Any users of Hauppauge could tell me the strength & weakness
of these 3 models in terms of performance & reliability ?
While the PVR-250 and 350 are older, that doesn't mean that they are less
caapable--the 150 is built to a price. You're comparing a $60 board to a
$160 board. While sometimes with electronics the newer product being
cheaper doesn't mean anything, in this case it does--TV tuners were a
mature technology with around 40 years of market experience before the
first PC was ever shipped.
Ask the shop if they have the 250 in stock to sell you. If not, then you
know why they are pushing the 150. Never, ever trust a computer
saleseman--even with the best of intentions he may be lying through
ignorance, and most of them don't know the products or the market
particularly well.
The 350 is in a different ballpark from the others--it has hardware for both
encoding and decoding where the 250 and 150 have it only for encoding.
With video boards having partial support for hardware decoding these days
and multi-GHz processor the norm, the hardware decoder on the 350 is less
useful than it once was, and unless you have a special requirement is
probably not justified.
You don't say where you are--I see you're posting from a Hong-Kong ISP so am
assuming you're there--before you spend money you might want to investigate
the availability of digital or high-definition signals in your area--if so
and if you want to receive them then the Hauppauge boards would not be the
best choices. In the US I'd say take a look at a Dvico board, but don't
know if they have a board that will work where you are.
