Home | Forums | Article Search | Subscribe & Shop | Contact Us | Log Out ATI Theater 650 Pro Email This Print This View My Personal Library Heavy Gear August 2006 • Vol.6 Issue 8 Page(s) 25 in print issue Add To My Personal Library ATI Theater 650 Pro Theater 650 Pro $109 ATI www.ati.com CPU Rating: 4.5 Specs: 125 channel TV tuner; 3D comb filter; MPEG-2 720 x 480 compression; FM radio reception; NTSC, PAL, SECAM support ATI recently announced the Theater 650 Pro chip with Avivo-supported hardware TV and DTV video encoding, noise reduction, and PVR functionality. The Theater 650 Pro is an improvement over its predecessor, the Theater 550, in a number of areas. Nearly everything about the 650 has been beefed up and enhanced over previous generations, and these boards will certainly give Nvidia’s DualTV MCE a run for its money. I looked at an ATI-supplied card that came equipped with a single mini-can tuner, which actually is a custom ATI design built by Samsung. The half-height PCI card also includes an FM radio tuner in its arsenal. In terms of nitty-gritty technical details, the new Theater 650 chip now has a full motion-adaptive 3D comb filter onboard, along with multistaged/multispeed gain control and automatic color control. The 650 chip also takes ATI’s Theater products into the world of DTV, along with hardware assist for signal detection for faster tuning. Via a combo FM/DTV coax port, you can attach a decent quality antenna and pull down local broadcast DTV programming free of charge. Speaking of which, you have to see digital TV programming on the Theater 650 to believe it. Probably the best features of this new TV tuner product are its hardware motion compensation and noise reduction capabilities. The card easily produced the most impressive image quality I’ve seen on a TV tuner to date, especially when viewing a DTV source. Color saturation, tone, and brightness were considerably better with this card compared to previous Theater 550 boards I’ve tested, with much less distortion and noise from either a standard cable or air broadcast DTV source. ATI board partners Gigabyte, Sapphire, HIS, MSI, and others will offer variations of the card, along with different software and supporting hardware bundles. I tested the card using ATI’s Catalyst Media Center software, which is sleek, intuitive, and a breeze to use with an accompanying USB Remote Wonder RF remote control. by Dave Altavilla  User Reviews Be the first to write a review of this product Want more information about a topic you found of interest while reading this article? Type a word or phrase that identifies the topic and click "Search" to find relevant articles from within our editorial database. Enter A Subject (key words or a phrase): ALL Words (‘digital’ AND ‘photography’) ANY Words (‘digital’ OR ‘photography’) Exact Match ('digital photography'- all words MUST appear together) Home      Copyright & Legal Information      Privacy Policy      Site Map      Contact Us Copyright © 2010 Sandhills Publishing Company U.S.A. All rights reserved.