Pinnacle PCTV HD mini Stick - High-def for 2008 & Beyond

With just 5 months left before the mandatory switch from analog to digital TV broadcasting for most TV stations, it's really time to think about upgrading your NTSC TV tuner to a digital equivalent. Pinnacle touts its latest PCTV HD mini Stick as the most compact HDTV tuner, which is just a tad larger than the first gen. thumbdrive. The claim does seem to be credible with its retractable connector and advancement in downsizing the components (compare this with the first HDTV stick released 2 years ago). Besides over-the-air TV (ATSC), the PCTV HD mini Stick can also make up unencrypted digital cable TV (aka. ClearQAM) for SDTV and HDTV signals for a max. resolution of 1080i.

A problem shared by OTA ATSC tuners is reception weakness, and the Pinnacle ships with a high-gain telescopic antenna as signal booster. The $119.99 miniature USB TV comes with TVCenterPro 5 - Pinnacle's latest PVR software that can save content into MPEG-1/2 or DivX, except MPEG-4, using software encoding. Bundled VideoSpin allows quick trimming of the recordings. There's a Mac version as well and costs $10 more, except it additionally comes with Elgato's EyeTV Lite, providing the same EPG, time-shifting and manual recording capabilities. Both TV dongles are certified to work seamlessly with Vista's Media Center.