WHILE IMAGE QUALITY is not this tuner's greatest strength, on all other fronts it gives more expensive models a run for their money. We are talking about the PVR 150MCE sepa¬rately and not including it in the main comparison as Hauppauge is not officially selling this model in India and availability can be an issue.

Having said that, you may find it in a fairly large store in the guise of an OEM piece There was a noticeable difference in picture quality when compared to the other models. Contrast and saturation levels had to be manually bumped up (with some effort, we must add) to improve the quality. Fast action scenes like sports sometimes caused a blur if you observed closely, but from a distance of four feet, this wasn't a problem.

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On the features side, it left nothing to be desired, especially at its price of Rs.l,300. It has an onboard MPEG2 encoder to enable recording of live TV without straining the CPU; a media center compatible remote control and an IR blaster which controls your set top box. Using a single remote control, you will be able to control the PVR software (or Windows Media Center) as well as your set top box.

The WinTV PVR software bundled is not the most user-friendly software around and that is a bit of a disappointment for a device that is other¬wise very well featured.