PixelView PlayTV Mobile TV Tuner Card 

This is a rather innovative product. It is a PCMCIA based TV tuner cum FM radio cum video capture card for notebooks. Installing it was just a breeze. One glance through the short manual and
you can get the product up and running in no time. We installed it on a ThinkPad R40 notebook. 

After the installation was done, we plugged into the TV's cable to the card and started the software. All you have to do after this is to click on the Settings button on the panel and when the 'Property
Setting' window opens up, you have to select the correct Country Settings. It is not just a mere formality, but this setting is
required to decode the TV signals properly. After this, just hit on the 'Search' button on the panel and you are done. 

The picture quality of the device is not bad but there is no error correction available in it. This feature is present in most TVs as well as TV Tuner cards these days, and is supposed to improve the quality of bad signals. The good thing is that this card can also do video capturing. For this, it has a separate composite video jack to which you can plug your video inputs. The video capture quality is excellent. We captured video from a DVD player and it went very smoothly. It saved the captured video in MPEG format. You can also save the files in MPEG II, MPEG 4 and AVI formats. 

One interesting thing we observed was that the video capture quality gets affected if there is a Bluetooth device nearby. 

It can also record TV programs and even do time scheduling, so it will automatically tune into the channel at the 

right time. 

The FM radio provides minimal functionality. For one, it's not able to detect the right FM frequencies, which makes it quite cumbersome to find them yourself, unless you remember their frequencies. There's no way to store the frequencies anywhere, so every time you have to scan them afresh. You can, however, enter the exact frequency you want to go to. Other than that there's nothing great about the radio. 

Bottom Line: Overall, since a lot of people are going for notebooks these days, this might be an accessory worth buying. Though there are better TV tuners out there than this, but it is a little special given its video capture and FM tuner.

Cybermedia Labs