Twinhan Ter D+A review

TV tuners are one of the most frustrating products available. Often they fail to work when they have just one format to deal with, so we were worried when we saw that Twinhan's Ter D+A PCI card supports both analogue and digital TV.

Fortunately, it works well. The installer program takes care of installing the drivers in just a few minutes. Things tend to go wrong when installing the TV software, but Twinhan has avoided problems by sensibly opting to use Cyberlink's PowerCinema. This looks much like Microsoft's Media Center interface, although it's not quite as slick.

Even so, it's much better than most TV tuner software and has an excellent setup wizard that lets you choose between digital and analogue TV. We started with analogue TV, and the device scanned for available channels. This took a while and, although there's a percentage status bar, it doesn't alert you when it's finished. Next, it scans for radio stations and, finally, music stored on your PC.

The TV search takes quite a while, but it's very good. Where the signal is strong enough the software also retrieves the channel name. It doesn't put the channels in order, but you can do this manually. The quality is on a par with that of other analogue products we've tested.

PowerCinema lets you schedule recordings as you would with a video recorder. There's no built-in electronic programming guide (EPG), but it can integrate with third-party services such as TVTV.

At any point you can rerun the setup wizard and select digital TV instead. The channel scan takes roughly the same amount of time for digital as it does for analogue TV. However, it retrieves all TV station names and furnishes the EPG with the free seven-day guide. Picture quality is significantly better and setting PowerCinema to record programmes is much easier.

You can time-shift both analogue and digital TV using the pause button on the remote. However, there were some annoying jitters on our screen when we resumed playback. The remote control is a little complex, lacking Media Center's simplicity.

The real question about this card is why would you want digital and analogue TV in one package? The answer, for most people, is that you wouldn't. However, it's not much more expensive than a digital-only card. If you live in an area that has poor digital reception, this card is a good way to prepare for when the quality improves. For everyone else, the inclusion of PowerCinema makes it one of the easiest TV cards to use.