As you've probably guessed by now, the Powercolor Theatre 550 Pro works as a TV-tuner ought to. Its combination of great image quality and perfect frame rates made us very happy campers indeed. ATI appears to have the makings of a hit on their hands with the Theatre Pro 550 chip.

We were less thrilled with the bundled Cyberlink PowerCinema 3 software. While it touches all the necessary bases and has a nice simple interface, it suffers from a couple of annoying flaws which we cannot overlook or excuse.

Most glaringly, the inability to change the directory in which captured video clips are saved is inexplicable!? While we did not get to play with this card using ATI's multimedia suite, Windows XP media centre edition or InterVideo's home theatre software, we find it likely that any one of these three products would be a better choice for ATI's newest TV-tuner chipset.

Based on recent home TV-tuner cards we have looked at, the Powercolor Theatre 550 Pro is a clear step up in terms of picture quality, vidcap quality and frame rate smoothness, and as such we feel comfortable recommending it. Just make sure you've got some good quality multimedia software to back it up.

Find out about this and many other reviews by joining the Weekly PCstats.com Newsletter today! Catch all of PCstats latest hardware reviews right here.

Related Articles

Here are a few other articles that you might enjoy as well...