Indeed, it is eerily silent on that front is it not!?!
Usually when a company has something noteworthy they want to shout it from the rafters but Theater 650 Pro partners don’t seem to be saying much at all. Its understandable if they are bound by an NDA but with the Theater 650 Pro chip already announced and said companies already named as partners it seems totally unnecessary to apply any such NDA at this time.
In any case, I came across another preview/review of the Theater 650 Pro here:
http://reviews.cnet.com/ATI_Theater_...-31908877.html http://reviews.cnet.com/ATI_Theater_...2.html?tag=nav Originally Posted by Cnet Reviewed by Dan Ackerman
The leader in TV tuner technology up until now has been ATI's TV Wonder Elite. ATI's Theater 550 Pro video-processing chip powers the low-profile card and delivers decent TV image quality. The company's newest version of the chip--the Theater 650 Pro--was announced yesterday and offers incremental improvements over its predecessor. Tuner cards featuring the Theater 650 Pro chip will be available from manufacturers such as MSI and Sapphire , and those products should range from $100 to $150. The new chip offers enough of a boost to image quality that TV-on-your-PC fans should give it a serious look; just know that CableCard technology for PCs is expected to hit next year.
We should start seeing retail cards using the Theater 650 Pro chip in July, but ATI sent us a reference board that we hooked up, via a simple PCI slot, to a Media Center PC in CNET Labs. In our hands-on tests, the Theater 650 Pro was the best TV tuner hardware we've seen to date. The Theater 650 Pro boasts a new video decoder along with several picture-quality tweaks and performance improvements. Some of the highlights include support for NTSC, PAL, and SECAM signals, plus digital TV via ATSC and DVB-T (the European digital standard), and hardware MPEG-2 encoding to spare your CPU from doing all the heavy lifting.
So according to this, Theater 650 Pro cards should retail between
$100 to $150.
Retail Theater 650 Pro cards should be available in July (which is widely believed but looking unlikely).
The review sample was a
reference board not a retail product but that’s not so uncommon given the date (one day after the Theater 650 Pro chip official announcement).
Originally Posted by Cnet Reviewed by Dan Ackerman
The good: Best-looking TV tuner hardware we've seen; supports both NTSC and ATSC; works well with Media Center and other PC DVR apps.
The bad: Even the best TV tuner has a worse image than a standard cable signal; CableCard will make other TV tuners obsolete next year.
The bottom line: Though it improves upon the category leader, with CableCard's technology for PCs on the horizon, ATI's latest TV tuner chip, the Theater 650 Pro, is only a stopgap solution for those looking to add TV to their PC.
Sorry if this review has already been linked too.
***edit***
There are more bits here:
Originally Posted by Wolfgang Gruener ATI told TG Daily that TV tuner cards, including boards from Asus, Sapphire, MSI, Powercolor and Visiontek, will become available in the July time frame. According to the manufacturer, the 650 Pro chip meets Microsoft's requirements to carry the "Vista Premium" logo.
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/06/06/at...s_theater_650/ http://www.computerpoweruser.com/edi...c08a.asp&guid=
I’ll just take note that this is yet another reference to the ubiquitous July time frame for Theater 650 Pro and the source is apparently an ATI representative.
One minor point, since Vista hasn’t been released or finalized, technically the specifications that presumably the Theater 650 Pro follows to qualify it as a Vista logo part could change.