7 out of 7 people found this review helpful.
EXCELLENT accessory for your Mac!
Date of Review: Nov 7, 2007
The Bottom Line: This is a great product. If you buy it, you won't need a TV set.
I had my iPhone refund coupons to spend, and couldn't think what to buy, so I ordered this little item. It's frankly amazing. I'm using it with a fairly recent MacBook (2.16GHz Core 2 Duo, 1GB RAM - you really want a dual core machine to get the most out of this device). I live in Queens, NY - I can see the Empire State building from my window - so all I had to do was put a dollar store rabbit-ear antenna on this unit and I can pick up 16 or 17 digital TV channels, some of which are in HD.
HD broadcasts look absolutely gorgeous. SD digital broadcasts are also pixel-perfect. The only "problem" you'll have is that you'll get used to the digital goodness, and when you switch back to analog programming, you'll find the picture quality annoyingly low!
The software works like a TiVo - you can pause and rewind live TV, you can record to hard disk, or you can schedule specific programming to be recorded automatically. There is an onscreen programming guide for channels in your area, with point-and-click record functionality. It's all totally transparent and a child could operate it.
There is no picture-in-picture support, and you cannot record one channel while watching another. This is not a limitation for me, but bear it in mind.
A different reviewer here wrote that this product can't record analog TV. That is not true - at least on my MacBook I can record analog just fine. When you're recording digital signals, the device dumps the raw MPEG-2 stream direct to your hard disk without transcoding, so you have the same original 100% quality. When recording analog, the unit transcodes the digitized signal.
This item is a perfect gift for a college student in a dorm room. S/he can connect it to an iMac and have the ultimate computer/TV/monitor for video games, all in one. The inbuilt tuner will receive nonscrambled cable signals, as well as regular analog TV broadcasts and ATSC digital TV broadcasts. So it will still be working fine after the great digital cutover.
Note: In North America, the agreement between Elgato and the TV programming data provider to provide a free programming guide will expire at the end of 2008; this is not advertised too well. It's probable you will need to buy a subscription at that time if you want to continue receiving the programming guide info.
