USB laptop tuner

I am looking for advice about buying a tuner for my Sony SZ, which will be upreplaced by a Sager 9262 within a year. I live in an apartment building which does not have a clean analogue signal with rabbit ears. Any suggestions would be welcome.

 

Hauppauge is a decent brand. I've been using a desktop Hauppauge tuner for years now and I've used a Hauppauge USB tuner as well. Both worked like they were supposed to (albeit with some occasional driver hiccups). I don't know how a dirty signal will affect the cards, but I'm betting they're built with some tolerance for that kind of thing.

For a USB tuner, don't expect to do anything more than watch/record television. Of the three USB TV tuners I've seen, all of them have had at least a one to second lag whether by virtue of the USB connection or some other factor. In other words, don't expect to be able to use a console or some other real-time device with the tuner.

Of course, that may not be the case with all USB tuners, but my two cents nonetheless.

 

Thanks for the warning about the lag. Anyone else with recom,endations?

 

i can tell you to stay away from pinnacle ati , the software sucks . with avermedia and haugpage you can drag you screen size to your liking, have pip or pop , not with pinnacle , fine tunning and user accounts on aver and haugpage , just much better software . i have both and don't use pinnacle because of this . i like the expresscard better than usb , but i guess usb is more universal .

 

I can't imagine USB being quite as good of quality as you can get with an express card, but yes I have heard nothing but good things from Hauppauge and even have a desktop version of it myself.

 

I am extremely satisfied with the DViCO Fusion 7 HDTV USB. It tunes NTSC, ATSC, and has inputs for composite and component for your cable box. You can hook it up to your cable line for HDTV QAM or receive OTA signals with it's portable antenna.

BTW, I have owned Hauppauge and ATI tuner cards and both of them had buggy software with limited features for the same price. Not only that, but the picture quality for SD programming was terrible and looked washed out. Suffice to say, I quickly sold them off on ebay.

 

I have not heard about DViCO Fusion 7 HDTV USB before. Anyone else use this? Unless I hear otherwise, i was going to try the Hauppauge out first.