As part of the upcoming 2009 digital TV transition the final phase of consumer electronics compliance was put into effect last month: any TVs, DVRs, etc. made from this point forward must also include an ATSC tuner. For the HTPC world this means that any PC TV tuner made from this point forward must have an ATSC tuner in addition to the NTSC one. Today I look at two ATSC/NTSC combination TV cards from two well known names in PC TV tuners: Hauppauge and AVerMedia.

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What is a 'combo' ATSC/NTSC Tuner?
There are two terms used in the ATSC/NTSC tuner market, while the definitions aren't 100% agreed upon, there is a general trend for their usage. The first term is 'hybrid' which is a rather simple design where the tuning module is a hybrid ATSC and NTSC tuner, this arrangement is an "either/or" setup: either you tune an analog channel (NTSC) or you tune a digital channel (ATSC). 'Hybrid' tuners are not desirable as they force you to choose one or the other, what is more these cards are often less compatible with MCE 2005 which expects to see a dedicated analog tuner alongside the digital tuner, in a hybrid design the analog tuner suddenly disappears/is locked from use when a digital TV channel is tuned.

The more desirable type of ATSC and NTSC tuner card is referred to as a 'combo' tuner. A 'combo' tuner is designed so that there are separate, dedicated, analog and digital tuners on the card, thus they can be used independently. What is more, these cards normally have hardware encoding for the analog TV portion, the same can't be said of 'hybrid' cards.
What is reviewed here are true 'combo' tuners with dedicated NTSC and ATSC tuners, this will become obvious from the pictures of the cards in the next section.

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