$fff|1-Hauppauge Win/TV Primio $ffc Reviewed by Dr.Dick TV Tuner/Video Digitiser/Teletext. Internal, PCI, requires 1 interrupt. Approx £76 inc. VAT & Delivery, Choice Peripherals: 0845 1 44 44 44 http://www.choice-peripherals.co.uk http://www.hauppauge.com I remember going to a computer fair in Cleethorpes with a school chum (which shows how long ago THAT was :) and seeing the latest thing, a video camera that could put your face on a screen in a super-lowres red on black display, or output it to one of those new-fangled 9-pin dot matrix things for you to keep, at the time it was pretty amazing, and the guy on the stall was doing a brisk trade in printouts at £1 a time. Later on, when the A500 was in it's prime 512k of Fast RAM was a luxury that I just about afford, I spent about £100 on a Rombo digitiser that plugged into the parallel port of my dinky little machine. With a steady pause VCR I could grab out pics in 4096 colours and impress my friends, and it was a pity that I didn't think about selling them at the computer fair for £1 each... Recently I got the digi-bug again. A trawl through the magazines revealed that the WinTV card was essentially a mighty fine piece of kit for around £100. Unfortunately I didn't quite have that much and so resigned myself to another few weeks without a new toy. Then one day the Choice catalogue dropped through the letterbox, and while idly flicking through I found an advert for a new version of the card - the WinTV Primio ar £55+vat. It took me about 13 seconds to locate my Switch card, and one was ordered. The card is a medium-sized PCI affair, not much bigger that the Matrox Mystique that it shares the case with. There are several connectors for you to make use of: RF in; Composite in; Line in; and Line out. The RF connector can be removed so that you can acually get the card into it's slot, then you simply re-attach it from the outside. The CD that comes with the card contains a wealth of software that was quite impressive: The actual WinCast driver; the Win/TV utility; a still capture utility; a Teletext utility; a Video capture program and a full- blown Digitial Video production tool, and all for that same price. The installer is pretty good in that, even when you have to restart your machine, it remembers which parts have been installed and continues with the rest automatically. I also received a floppy disk containing the latest update, it is important that you install this before using the card for the first time, otherwise you'll do what I did and wonder if you've been sent a duff one. If only I'd read the instructions eh? Oh well... And so, on with the show. The capping quality from both RF and composite is quite simply excellent. Occasionally there are a few black lines across the captures image which have to be edited out, but I can't say if that's down to my PC or just the card. PSP takes good care of those anyway. The only other gripe is that normal capping (using Ctrl-C to copy the screen to the Clipboard) only grabs the last image, so you'll need a utility like Clipmate to set up multiple clip buffers. It would have been nice to have this on the CD though. Depending how much memory you have, you might find your clip buffer filling up quite quickly, which manifests itself in a lag between you actually pressing the Ctrl-C combo and the screen blanking as the image is copied. With 64Mb RAM this doesn't happen for quite some time, 32 is okay as well but 16 would really be pushing it. Before all you Amiga users shout "You need 64Mb RAM?!?" I must point out that the images you are capturing are in True Colour and are about 800x600 pixels in the mode that I use. You can set it down to 640x480 if you wish, but they're still True Colour images, and they are BIG! Likewise, creating a movie file can soon leave you running short on space if you don't have a few hundred megs free. For example, a 30-second video clip at 320x240 and 15 frames/sec with 8Khz audio will take up about 80Mb in AVI format. Converting this to MPEG will vastly reduce the filesize, but it's still a massive overhead. That said, it IS exceptional quality! Capping straight to harddisk, I capped the entire 30-second trailer for "Starship Troopers", and it is pretty damned good, despite the low resolution. Windows Media Player (MPlayer.exe) will play such a file in full screen mode on a decent CPU, not bad at all considering how inefficient AVI can be. MPEG output would be very nice but, again, no software is supplied to do this, or even to convert from AVI to MPEG. The teletext utility is extremely useful, and I find myself using it when I have the RF connected, because it's set up as a Fasttext unit, and my TV only had the original version. It has 4 font sizes to choose from, and typing a number into the keypad brings up an auto-window that closes when you hit Enter. It's all pretty straight forward to use and quite well put together too. All in all it is a pretty amazine piece of kit, and I am reliably informed that the models are being improved all the time, one guy (who shall remain nameless cause WE HATE HIM!) bought one and found it to have a built-in Nicam Stereo decoder. Alright for some innit? The Primio is the base model but it still sports a wealth of features, and as such I can heartily recommend it. George Daws, what are the hardware scores? Installation 9/10 - Make sure you have a space PCI slot. Ease of Use 9/10 - Ctrl-C, if ONLY Clipmate were included! Value for Money 10/10 - What can you say? £76 all in? Brill! Output Quality 10/10 - Tops, rivals the bizarre "Snappy". Overall 9½/10 - Some s/ware additions would have made it 10, but you'd be a donkey not to buy one just for that reason! Dr.Dick $fffend