Shrunken Elgato EyeTV Hybrid Mac USB TV Wears Windows 7 Badge

It's been a year since the release of the improved 2009-model EyeTV Hybrid, and without a name change, Elgato once again revamps the Mac USB HDTV tuner, now featuring a even sleeker chassis. The 2010 model includes pretty much you would find on last year version, including top notch ATSC reception; unencrypted Clear QAM; EyeTV 3; streaming to iPhone / iPod touch; and least but not least, ability to receive NTSC broadcasts. Even though America has stopped analog TV altogether, the analog source still finds its use in archiving VCR and recording video gameplay.

If you don't have a Mac, then there's little reasons to justify dropping $150 on this HDTV dongle. Perhaps the new Windows 7 Media Center compatibility might change your mind. Boot camp users may also find this to be useful when they are staying with Windows. The lack of a hardware encoder (needed to transcode video to lower bit-rate for space saving reason) also leaves something to be desired since not everyone is interested in letting the EyeTV Hybrid consuming over 8GB per hour on some slow-paced TV show (i.e. LOST).

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