7 August 2008 16:00 GMT / By Stephen Patrick

Television on your PC is nothing new but this digital set-to box can deliver a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels either directly to your PC or if you wish plug it straight into an exteral monitor, the idea being that you can skip the HD ready TV completely and simply use your monitor.

Being digital tuner, you'll need a digital connection on your monitor or you can dumb the signal down to analague with a plug adapter. It supports Picture-In-Picture as well as Picture Pause, Teletext and even has an OSD (On Screen Display).

On the front of the unit you'll find S-Video in, Composite in, S-Video out and Composite out sockets, while on the back you'll find DVI input from your PC, a DVI-out to connect straight to an external monitor, as well as audio connection from your PC that you can send out to dedicated speakers. Rounding out the package is a TV antenna input.

The set-up menu is a little complicated and we found it harder to set-up than we were expecting, largely due to rather basic manual instructions that assume the user will be used to setting such equipment up.

What’s worse, the results are a little disappointing as we found that most digital channels failed to tune in, leaving us restricted to mainly just terrestrial channels.

When it came to hooking it up to an Xbox 360, something the box claims is an ideal option, the problems persisted. The biggest problem was the quality of the image, which looked stretched.

Verdict

AverMedia has launched a wide number of TV products that work a lot better than the Hybrid STB 1080i and we’d readily recommend any USB TV tuner and a notebook over this version, as the results are far from satisfying.

Score

Review Recap

Made by

AverMedia

Price as reviewed

£130

The good

Plenty of connection options

The bad

Tricky to setup, not the best results, can stretch images

Quick verdict

Sure, you can watch TV without having to hook up a PC but the results are less than impressive – especially for the price

Key specs

Composite, DVI, S-Video

Score

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