ATI 550 vs Hauppauge for quality?

[dvd_maniac]

I have 2 USB2's 1 250 and 1 500. How does the 550 stack up to the Hauppauge's as far as quality goes?

[dbfresh23]

Rather then create a new thread on this, I'll just bump this older one.

I'm interested in a quality comparison also. Going by the specs of the ATI it sounds like it'd be a much better card, but specs aren't everything...

[PGPfan]

I'd be curious on this as well. For me, the biggest attraction is that it is available in pci-e.

-PGPfan

[thatdude90210]

I replaced two pvr250 cards with 2 Sapphire 550 pro cards. I have no experience with the pvr 150 or the 500. Picture quality, in terms of color, are close. You could probably tweak each one to beat the other.

But the one thing that I wasn't happy with the pvr 250 was picture smoothness... whether it's fast panning, fast motion scenes, or fast sports, I could never get a completely smooth picture with all the codecs and tweaks I tried.

The 550 pro does better with those scenes. I have a Sapphire x1600pro agp paired with the two 550 pro cards. Those fast panning, fast motion, and fast sports scenes are smooth & natural. If I could tweak it just a touch sharper, it would be close to watching those scenes on my tv's own tuner.

[korben_dallas]

Originally Posted by thatdude90210

I have a Sapphire x1600pro agp paired with the two 550 pro cards.

How is that x1600pro? What did you have before it?

[thatdude90210]

Originally Posted by korben_dallas

How is that x1600pro? What did you have before it?

I had a x800pro in that machine before. That one was ok, but the picture smoothness feels more natural in the x1600pro. I'm running overlay, as I like the default colors on that better.

I only tried vrm9 briefly, and it didn't feel as smooth as overlay, and the default color was a little washed out compared to overlay. I could probably tweak it better, but I'm already happy with overlay defaults.

I have an x800 in a client machine, but it's not connected to the same display so it might not be a fair comparison. The x1600 is connected to a plasma via dvi, and the x800 is connected to an lcd via dvi. Both with exact same video settings in SageTV.

Playing the same basketball game, one of the best test for picture smoothness, the x1600 just feels more natural, even though the x800 still looks fine. Then I noticed something, the score ticker scrolling by the bottom of the screen showed the difference. The scrolling scores was perfectly smooth on the x1600, but I see some minor stutters in the x800 scores scrolling.

I don't know if it's a result of the lcd respond time or what, just an observation.

Btw, the x1600 picture looks like it does better with deinterlacing too.

[Ctrl-Z]

I have a Hauppauge PVR-USB and a Sapphire 550 pro card and I honestly can't tell the difference in picture quality between the two. Maybe the Sapphire card is a bit better when watching fast moving sports. However the Sapphire card audio output is way lower than the Hauppuage tuner forcing me to adjust the volume significantly when watching shows recorded on a different tuner. The low audio output on the 550 pro chipset cards has been mentioned frequently - who knows if it can or will be fixed. But having this audio problem is a lot better than the Hauppauge PVR-150 I used to have which didn't have any audio for many of my channels (in SageTV anyway).