Video Reviews

the support staff assisted me with my predicament and i was able to receive the cable quickly through amazon.com

great product

Got this card with a Athlon 64 3000+, 120GB SATA HD, 80GB IDE HD, Abit Max3 MOBO, 1GB OCZ Gold PC-4000 RAM, Audigy 2 Card, Logitech Z-640 speakers, Antec Sonata Case, and a Cooler Master

Similar performance to the 9600 Pro, but with slightly higher clock speeds and a coupon for a free copy of Half-Life 2. I made the mistake of buying this card over a 9500 card because HL2 probably wont come out. But it's worth a shot. I like the screensavers you get on the catalyst driver disk. They were the most popular file share at my last LAN party. I also like the retail box. You can cut out the ATI logo with the "RADEON XXXX" and stick it on your case. The little security badge thingie is also pretty fun to play with...

After a year of shopping, my wife & I decided to experience this puppy. Granted that all plasma t.v.s look great, this one on the show floor looked a tad better, so we sprang for the extra bucks after first getting a sale price, then a 10% discount ontop of an additional 10% discount. It was merely a horribly expensive unit instead of obscenely expensive that way.

At home, we had an installer scheduled to come out and mount it on the wall, but we couldn't wait and went ahead and did the installation on the pedastle, which is a two person job and takes about 3 hours, with the constant fear of dropping something on the screen. We didn't break anything, but I don't recommend self installation unless you have nerves of steel.

After haggling with the cable company, we added HDTV service and after about 5 days managed to review the unit in the following modes:

1. analog cable t.v.
The image quality is good, probably superior to regular NTSC quality. Key advantage is you can toggle the 5 or so image scale modes to make it fit just right. There is a progressive distortion mode that while stretching the image to fit the 16:9 from the NTSC standard, does it so well that there is no obvious distortion except for the rare case where you see what should be a circle in one of the corners. The image size is such that you really can't take in the whole screen at once so it's a rarely if ever noticed distortion and visually quite good considering the low quality of analog broadcast
2. digital cable t.v.
Probably not a great idea. You have two modes on the Hitachi and 3 modes on the cable box to scale the image, and they seem to fight eachother resulting in a less than stellar picture. I actually prefer analog for quality when all settings are done. I would suspect the same issues with Satellite, but I'm not ready to add that to my gadget list to be sure.
Special note for folks who have "movie on demand" fantasies. NONE of the "movies on demand" are HDTV format. Maybe next year. I'm disappointed, but with my cable company, not Hitachi.
3. digital 1080i cable t.v.
Granted, this device is not a 1080i display, it's 1,280 by 780, but however it down-converts the signal, it's an amazingly clear picture. The only concern you might have is looking at the imperfections on people's faces that are normally invisible. I mean, how many of you will find your attention distracted by looking at the details of the hairs growing from a mole on the interviewer's face. Sometimes, detail it too much of a good thing, but by all that's holy, it's remarkable detail and quality. My suspicion is that satellite folks will love this mode too. HOWEVER, there are very few HDTV channels right now, and I'd say, like all t.v. wasteland material, maybe 1 or 2 has something interesting.
4. svideo DVD
A high quality display that looks fine, but you'll discover that frame sizes vary depending upon DVD producer's whim and you may find yourself toggling among 6 different display modes trying to find one that won't burn-in and that looks good too. I don't have the HDTV composite version of a DVD player so I can't comment on that and I blew my toy budget for the next 3 years so it'll be a while before I know how wonderful that feature is.
5. RCA jack vhs video
This is the worst image quality mode, due to the source. however the analog variable image scaling works well, and the picture is better than when displayed on the baby 30 inch sony 3:4 that this replaced.
6. RGB output from a PC
Jury is out here. I've hooked 3 different PCs into this and know for sure that your milage will vary. Depending on which version of Windows you have, whose display driver you have, etc, etc, you will either get a stunning image of your desktop, or a stunning distorted image of your desktop. Be warned a 1280 X 780 display is obviously not the top display mode debugged by video card driver makers. It's not that you won't get it to work, but you may find that your actual display size is, well, funny. Hitachi has a nice "auto size" mode that at least gets the desktop to fill the screen, irrespective of what the video card driver wants to do. You can browse easily, clearly, and start shopping at once for a wireless keyboard and mouse. We did.
7. Universal remote vs. Universal remote
There were actually three settups done for us. The one my wife & I did, the one the official installer did, and the one the cable boy did. Each of us knows how a system should be wired, and how the universal remote should be programmed. At the end of the day, I had THREE universal remotes, sony, cable company, and hitachi. Each programmed by the mad mind of the perfect configurator. At the end of the day, the universal remote that works best is the Hitachi, which surprised me. The cable guy insisted that it would never work with the cable box. I discovered that it works better with the cable box than the universal remote that came with the cable box. That doesn't mean you will have ONE universal remote. Mixed vendors = mixed results. I can now get by with TWO universal remotes, provided I keep a third nearby. Driving 5 different vendor's devices with 2.5 remotes ain't bad.
8. Burn in
Hitachi says, never keep the side bars (normal HTDV display) on for more than 15% of the time, lest thou shalt melt the phosphor and destroy your display. I looked at the persistance image after turning the device off (in the dark), and my guess is that 15% is the maximum. I plan on keeping it down to as close to zero as possible. If you plan on using this with a PC, make sure your screen saver is really on, and really doing a dynamic or BLACK display unless you want to see START on the bottom of your display for eternity. (apologies to MAC users)

This is great!I love it!I got it at a store near my home and I use on trips and everything!!!It's a great product except the battery ran low quite often for me.

Camera take exceptional pictures, has high quality in Hi8 mode. You can purchase long life batteries (>2500 MaH) that allow you to record for extremely long periods even using the LCD screen as your viewfinder. The image stabilization is very good, allowing videos to be hand held, but yielding a very stable picture. The internal lens cap feature is very nice, out of the way when shooting, yet nothing to lose. The resolution on the direct viewfinder is exceptional, and even though it is B/W it is very usable combined with the color LCD for playback. Having an internal viewfinder is extremely useful in bright light situations where the LCD is washed out/hard to see.

Overall an exceptional product, with a very good price. Has held up well in trips to Europe, Western USA, and New England, as well as for family gatherings.

Terrific product. We love that we don't have to think about which remote points where. Hot Link doesn't care. You can point your remote towards the ceiling if you want and your components respond without a hitch. Very slick.

We actually have two Hot Links. The second one solved another problem for us: Our DSS receiver is hooked up next to the TV in our living room. We've split off the signal so that we can watch DirecTV from our bedroom TV as well. The problem is that we couldn't change channels from our bedroom. There's an extension cable you can get for the Hot Link eye so we set up the eye in our bedroom and hooked up an emitter to the DSS receiver in the living room. Voila! We can now change channels from the bedroom.

Hot Link is one of those happy products that you don't realize you can't live without - until you own one. Very happy customers are we.

Bought this mainly because of the price. It was way cheaper than router and cables. This includes cables which are the most expensive part of networking. The draw backs are it looks cheap,blank shell no lights or anything on router, cables are about 8ft long 4 included in the pack. It works great if you want to create a room into a lan party. The cables are to short though to go to far. This has worked well for the seemingly low quality compared to a namebrand router and cables, but hey I don't care if anyone steps on the cables of spills on it or whatever, it didn't cost me a lot of money. Pros are easy to use plug in and go, and price ofcourse.

this is an excellent digital camera for the amateur photographer. the image quality is amazing and the download speed is better than my moms HP camera. the camera is well built, i've droped it a few times and it's still alright. i love the video mode and the is no delay between pressing the shutter button and the shutter activating (taking the picutre). i would highly reccomend this product to anyone at all!

My old P3 500 just not keeping up anymore. Plus small apt could really use more spaces. This Pacco CIU computer really fills all my need for new computer. Plus it's a TV too!! i can even play my playstation with it while using picture in picture doin msn messanger with friends. And best part is TV did not use any computer resources, my memory and CPU doesnt not slowdown by it. Very compact and easy to carry, weight about 20 lbs. I can hand carry it from my apt to my buddy's house, and only need one power cord to connect. Picture is clear and better quality than my friens' 15" lcd monitor he just bought. Price is right too, compare to other desktop that will need to buy monitor too. I have too many good things say about it. I really highly recommend to people looking new computer!!!

This card moves high end game software graphics at rapid speeds on the highest setting. A title like FAR CRY can be played at it's full potential with AA applied & other high end resolution settings.

Unlike some other FX5950-Ultra cards this one is advertised as working with a 300 Watt power supply rather than 350 watt or higher. I have a 5950 from another company but this one seems to run cooler, quieter and faster. It appears to have a better ventilation/fan cooling system than some. Comes with quality game and instillation software. The card does require the AGP and adjoining PCI slot and a connection from the card to the power supply. Most with high end computers will not find this a problem. To me, the card is meant for computers with a 2 GHZ cpu or higher, otherwise the processor may limit the advantage/benefits of this higher quality/priced graphics card.

If your computer is up to specs then I definitely would recommend this card. It does everything I want it to. Another advantage is that the Jaton card is currently about $50.00 less than most other 5950 cards.