MCE TV Tuner Roundup: Featuring ATI's Theater 550 & NVIDIA's NVTV

Third Place - Tie: eMuzed Maui-II PCI PVR

For the third place runner-up, we have a tie between the eMuzed Maui-II PCI PVR and ATI's eHome Wonder PCI. 

The eMuzed Maui-II PCI PVR is another very common OEM solution and despite the fact that it uses the same LSI DVXPLORE codec as NVIDIA's NVTV, the Philips analog tuner ensures that we don't have the same grainy picture issues that we had with NVIDIA's card. 

The Maui offered fairly competitive picture quality, although slightly noisier than our first and second place offerings.  Once again, we see that the biggest problem ends up being how the tuner handles text.  With fewer artifacts than the fourth place AVerMedia, eMuzed still can't display text perfectly.  It's not exactly text, but rather borders with any sort of movement in them is where you get most of the problems.

Note the dots in the line above the text

The text artifacts are present here as well.

You can get an idea of some of the level of noise here.

Although it's fairly hard to find, the eMuzed Maui-II goes for under $99.