Hi Sam;
I have had 7 (yes seven) TV tuner cards for my PC over the years & can honestly say that the ATI is by far the best one out there.
My first ATI was an A-I-W Pro.
I'm on my second ATI (an A-I-W 7500; same as the 8500 except for the video processor speed) & love it.
Can't wait to get my hands on an A-I-W Radeon 9700 Pro (as soon as the price drops out of the stratosphere).
Many TV tuner cards suffer from a brightness issue including the ATI (but it is brighter then many).
If you have a DVD of a movie and have the fortune to see the same movie on the TV, try running them both at the same time. The DVD will be much brighter then the TV. I have some movies on both DVD & store bought VHS movies. Again the DVD is much brighter.
JimH... are you listening? we need to have all the main TV controls available through a hot key. ATI does it very nicely with the TAB key. You just keep pressing the tab key & it cycles through all the basic TV controls... Brightness, Gamma, Contrast, Hue, Volume, etc.
TV tuner cards do produce a much sharper picture as they use various forms of re-interlacing to fill in the space between the scan lines that are very noticeable on a regular TV. I run my Sony 19" flat-screen at 1028 x 1280 & there is absolutely no scan lines visible no mater how close you look. No regular TV can do that to my knowledge without some sort of special scanning box.