Compro VideMate TV Gold+ review - Page 1 - A Matey Introduction

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New week new review, and this one has been on my desk for quite a while now. As you all know, Personal Cinema and All-In-Wonder products from both NVIDIA and ATi are quite popular. A graphics cards with TV functions that can record, playback, timeshift television, media recordings and the power to dit them. I personally dig TV options with any PC, I love the option to watch the news the Playboy Channel in a smaller big window on the monitor.

These products are known for their reputation of hooking up external devices like a camcorder and record + edit movies. Fantastic gear, yet with a big downside. These cards are integrated onto a graphics card. Meaning if you buy an ATI All-in-Wonder 9800 then you'll pay a lot of money for a product that is gaming wise outdated on one maybe two years.

That means whenever you want to upgrade to a new graphics card you need to chip in the money and buy AIW (All-In-Wonder) again and again ... A much more feasible solution is to separate the 'AIW' function from the graphics card and this can be done with the help of a PCTV card. There are many on the market, almost all expensive and not very feature rich. Today's product however is something different, a new generation on TV Cards, and Compro is making them for a price that just is fantastic.

Today's product review will be from Compro and is called the VideMate Cinema TV Gold+; a product that you can insert into your PCI bus and meanwhile you can upgrade that graphics card of years as often as you wish. Compro is not a name that we all recognize, though we already reviewed a couple of their product. They tend to focus on the OEM market yet went retail and e-tail with their product ever since they released their first Personal Cinema products from a famous chipzilla in the graphics cards industry.

The VideoMate TV Gold+ is not just a TV card, no it handles Stereo TV and Radio, acts as programmable video recorder, records media files through an external source and hey .. it'll will even boot up your PC when you program the software to record a TV show. An absolutely fantastic device.

To complement the product we'll find a nice remote control along with the card from which you can choose channels, options, software and hey .. one button recording.

There she is, Compro's VideoMate TV Gold+ [click images for high-res photo's]