15. Analog And Digital TV Plus FM Radio

The integrated TV/FM radio tuner in a Mini PCI ExpressCard package uses the AVerMedia AverTVCardbus MCE to deliver analog and digital TV signals to the notebook, and to support private video recorder (PVR) functions, all through Windows Media Center Edition 2005. Whether or not this is a good way to handle the TV side of AV remains an open question. In our tests, however, we had no problems with TV and FM radio reception via cable (note: because the test was conducted in Germany, the testers had access to the DVB-T satellite network there, which is not available for digital TV and HDTV in north America).

The IR remote that's included with the notebook makes it easy to manage TV channels. But why Asus decided to bundle a big, ugly IR receiver with this unit is a mystery to us. There was room for them to have built in a CE-IR receiver right next to the FIR-lens on the front of the case instead.

Yet another big and ugly USB IR receiver.

Maximum speaker volume during TV reception and DVD playback inside Windows MCE was a bit too low for our taste. We wish the Asus engineering team had done a better job of boosting the output volume of the TV tuner card before feeding it into the input of the audio card. Toshiba's Qosmio models use a high quality 1-bit audio amplifier for this purpose.

HDTV without letterboxing isn't possible on the A7J's 17" display, thanks to the low standard resolution of current broadcast TV material, whether in NTSC (North America) or PAL (Europe and much of the rest of the world, except Asia) formats.