Twinhan TerD+A review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 19 Sep 2007

Price when reviewed: £22

Supplier: http://www.saverstore.com

Reviewed By: Seth Barton

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

TwinHan's TerD+A won our last TV tuner Labs in Shopper October 2006, thanks to its excellent PowerCinema software.

However, since then Twinhan has switched to bundling its own software with the tuner. The PCI card has S-video and composite inputs for capturing analogue video to MPEG2 files, and the bundled remote is big, clearly labelled and easy to use.

The drivers and software are easy to install, but they don't work under Vista. The card comes with BDA drivers, though, so it'll work with Media Center in both XP and Vista. The scan tool didn't run automatically, so we had to find it ourselves. DVB-T picture quality was average, while the analogue reception was good with only a little ghosting and little noise.

The software is poorly designed, however. It is cluttered with small icons, it's confusing to use, and it can be hard to tell what's going on when you're timeshifting, recording or pausing live TV. Channel changing was slow, but it's easy to switch between DVB-T, analogue and video inputs.

The EPG provides a list of channels, and you select one to see a list of upcoming programmes. It's not as user-friendly as a timeline layout. You can schedule recordings from these lists, but they aren't marked on the EPG for future reference.

Using the TerD+A's new software is likely to drive you to distraction. With Vista not yet supported, this tuner has gone from a Best Buy to something we'd recommend only to the handful of people who need a PCI tuner for a Windows XP Media Center system.

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