USB TV Tuner for your portable High-Def fix

All these cellphones for the Far East boasting DMB digital TV tuners can get a boy quite down; we’re stuck for the most part with plugging a USB tuner stick into our laptops.  But peripheral-people Pinnacle are giving us something to be proud of – well, if you’re in the US that is – with their HD digital tuner.  Our friends over at Everything USB got one of these 1080i capable sticks in and tested it out, finding that ATSC HDTV blows good old NTSC out of the water, right across the dock-yard and into the nearest skip.

The penalty?  Making it so compact means that it’s your CPU taking the strain of all that HD decoding; Pinnacle claim a Pentium 4 @ 2.4GHz or a Pentium M @ 1.3GHz with 512MB of RAM should do it, but reviewer Scott Clark found just watching HD channels took up between 20% and 36% of his Core Duo 2.0GHz’s capability.  Still, take a look at the comparison shot between an NTSC channel and its ATSC counterpart after the cut, and tell me you aren’t at least a little tempted.  It’s even more impressive that both PCs and Macs can join in the fun, as the tuner is compatible with both, although the software that’s supplied is less than ideal.

Another great review, and definitely well worth a read.

Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro USB TV Tuner Review [Everything USB - thanks to Ian for the tip!]