HAUPPAUGE WinTV NOVA-T review

The spread of digital TV in the UK under the Freeview brand has been one of the biggest growing mainstream technologies of the past two years.

Like mobile phones and DVD players it has won its place in our lives. PCs have not escaped this technological revolution, and digital broadcasting is now readily available on a computer monitor in your home.

TV cards have never been the easiest piece of kit to install and set up. WinTV NOVA-T continues in this tradition by installing two applications to control the hardware. After referring to the manual to find out which one we should be using, we then attempted channel setup. Though one of the ugliest pieces of software we've seen, the channel setup worked well and our only irritation was the time-consuming effort required to get the basic five stations assigned to the correct channel numbers.

The manual is essential reading for working your way round the less than transparent interface. We'd also recommend you get used to the onscreen mouse interface before attempting to use the bundled remote control, as mastering both at once is near impossible.

In its defence a fully featured TV card such as this has a lot of functions; imagine the confusion of trying to master your TV, VCR and digital radio all at the same time.

Picture quality is excellent in both window and full-screen mode; playback was good and free of any artefacts or noise. It has one of the best pictures we've seen and deals ably with all the digital TV widescreen ratios. However, attempting to change channels or pause live TV is sluggish compared to a dedicated set-top box.

Recordings look just as good as live TV, thanks to the digital nature of the material. All the usual functions of pausing, recording and rewinding live TV are present, although a large hard disk is a must if you plan to make the best use of this facility. No electronic programme guide is available with this product, so you'll have to resort to printed listings and the usual Freeview 'now and next' programme information. The recording scheduler is an entirely separate program. It's easy enough to use but is limited to recording programmes in multiples of 30 minutes, which is very annoying.

Like many TV cards, the NOVA-T is quite capable of receiving and displaying digital TV, but is let down by the software interface that controls it. At this price it's decent value for money for a digital tuner, but it pales in comparison to Nebula Electronics' DigiTV USB in our Hotlist.