Customer Reviews

Diamond TVW750USB ATI Theater HD 750 USB TV Tuner

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

Bought the Diamond TV Wonder 750U to replace the OEM HD receiver in my HP Slimline. The OEM receiver was overheating and causing my computer to randomly freeze.

I've had TV tuners in my computers for 15 years or more, usually ATI All-In-Wonder cards, so I'm quite familiar with performance of these units.

The TV Wonder 750U installed easily and works GREAT! The HD quality is top notch and the TV functions perfectly with Vista Windows Media Center.

I also installed the TV Wonder on my laptop and again, the TV Wonder 750U worked perfectly in Vista Windows Media Center.

I highly recommend this product!

Having been satisfied with Diamond tuners in the past, I bought a TVW750U tuner to receive unencrypted digital cable. At the end of the USB stick, there is a female plug for the over-the-air antenna, but no threaded connector for the coax cable, as shown in the manual that accompanied the tuner. The manual listed an RF Coax adapter in the package contents, but it was missing. And,yes, I was very careful to inventory all of the items in the package. A trip to Radio Shack for the adapter is quicker and less hassle than getting a replacement package.

Product works great. It picks up Clear-QAM channels better than a HVR-1600 and asus comb 210e when using Windows 7 MCE. Also analog cable channels look almost as good as my tv's built in tuner. I had to download the latest drivers (9.11). Only down side is that its a single tuner and not dual hybrid tuner. So I can't watch an analog cable channel and a digital channel at the same time.

I have to say I am glad to be a proud owner of a ATi Theater HD 750 USB TV Tuner. It works great for what I wanted and need it to do. Also the 9.11 drivers work amazing with it. Just one thing you have to look out for when setting up this USB TV Tuner for the first time is make sure that you have the Driver CD in the drive at the time or else it won't recognize the TV Tuner, but other then that it works amazingly well and I am happy with buying this and would recommend it to others.

This is a great little device. It was plug and play in my Win7 i3 laptop. Windows Media Center found it and had it installed in about 3 minutes. No additional drivers or software were needed. Picture quality is excellent on a 15.9" screen. The remote works well and is a nice addition. There is also a tiny rabbit ears antenna on a 6' cable that comes with a suction cup mount and a clip on mount for a laptop screen. It also has an input port for video from an external device. Cables are included for audio, composite video and S-Video. There is also a short usb extension cable if you don't want to plug the tuner directly into the usb port. All accessories and the device itself are of good quality. I would highly recommend this product.

This product had great reviews on Amazon, and its promised features at a low price warranted those reviews. But the actual product I received did not live up to expectations, perhaps because the product works great in some computer configurations but not others.

Specifically, the product packaging said the product was compatible with Windows 7. But I found out that wasn't the case. The product comes with a disk with many drivers on it, including drivers for 32 and 64 bit versions of Vista. But there were no drivers for Windows 7. I also checked the company's website. While it had all the drivers on the disk shipped with the product, it also did not have Windows 7 drivers. I tried installing the relevant Vista drivers on two machines 1) a 64 bit desktop running Window 7 Home Premium (with the drivers on the disk), and 2) a 32 bit ultraportable (a type of Netbook with more memory and a faster processor than a typical Netbook) running Windows 7 Home Premium (with the drivers downloaded from Diamond's website). In both cases, my installer said the drivers were incompatible with the Windows 7 Home Premium operating system.

I figured that I might well be overlooking something. After all, many Vista drivers are compatible with the Windows 7 Home Premium operating system. Moreover, one of the Amazon reviewers for this product stated, incidentally to his review, that the product worked fine on his Windows 7 computer. I remain open to the possibility that the version of the product I got is compatible with Windows 7 in at least one configuration.

Based on such a theory, I went to Diamond's website and found its support section. As is often the case, there was no telephone number to call for tech support. No problem, I'm used to that. I saw no articles in the knowledgebase on Windows 7 compatibility for this particular product, so this left me with two options: submit a ticket (via a web form) or chat with an online representative. All this looked very professional, and I was suitably impressed. I started by submitting a ticket. Before I would be done about two weeks later, I would have submitted four of them--none receiving any reply.

Here they are:

May 21, 2010.
I purchased the HD750 to work with my Acer Windows 7 netbook. The netbook has no DVD slot, so I went to your website to download the driver. Your website offers no Windows 7 driver for the HD750, despite the fact that the box says the product works on the Windows 7 operating system. When I seek to download the second best alternative, the driver for the 32 bit Vista version, I get a fatal error message midway through installation. I have done this a half dozen time and get the error message each time. It appears to me that the Vista 32 bit version of your product won't work with my Windows 7 netbook, but I hope you'll show me that I'm wrong to jump to that conclusion. Please show me how I can install the right driver on my laptop.

May 25, 2010
Please let me know when you'll be able to get back to me on my query above.

Thank you.


May 30, 2010
It's been more than a week now before my initial email to you.

Please let me know when you'll answer my May 21 query. If I don't hear from you in the next few days, I'll request a refund from Amazon and write up my experience with your company accordingly.

June 01, 2010
I have now tried to use your support chat line about a half dozen times during business hours. This is the message I get every time after I hit the submit button: "Sorry! All operators in the department are currently offline." After taking the trouble to fill in the chat screen, getting this reply is incredibly annoying.


Beginning around May 25, I also started attempting to enter my original ticket via a "chat." I figured if the ticket approach wasn't working, perhaps the chat approach would. But, as described in my June 1, 2010 ticket, every time I tried to start a chat--and I tried this at least a half dozen times over the course of a week--I got this message: "Sorry! All operators in the department are currently offline."

In the end, the pseudo technical support bothered me more than the incompatibility with Windows 7 Home Premium. I called Amazon, explained the situation, and was immediately sent a postage-prepaid form so I could return the product to Amazon and get a full refund. Thank god for Amazon's return policy! And shame on Diamond for promising more than it was able to deliver.

I decided to go satellite/cableless in my new home and rely on OTA broadcasts and Internet. That turns out to be an excellent approach. However, I did not have a DVR between my antenna and television. After much research I bought this little device and use it with my laptop. Here's the amazing thing. I get better reception with this tiny tuner and antenna than I get with my HDTV and a larger powered HD antenna. It can't be the quality of the antenna given the small size of this one so I have concluded that the tuner in the Diamond TVW750U is better than the tuner in my big plasma HDTV.

The software that comes with tuner is fine but I prefer to use Windows Media Center so it is really just surplus for me.

Overall, a very good buy.

I am blown away with the performance of this product. I have a brand new Toshiba 32" HDTV hooked up to an amplified antenna, and it generally works great but requires the occasional getting up and moving/turning of the antenna to keep the signal flowing. I hooked up the same antenna--leaving it in the same location of the house; nothing moved at all--to this card and the signal works 99.9% perfectly with zero need to ever reposition the antenna while watching TV for 3 hours straight. Hooked up to the Toshiba TV the antenna requires moving around about once every 45 mins or so to keep things flowing. So, this card appears to get at least as good a signal as a brand new 1080p Toshiba TV, and probably better. In addition, the card does come with DVR software which works great and is easy to use. This listing makes no mention of DVR capabilities but they are included! I have used only one other USB TV tuner in the past and it was much the same as the Toshiba TV with periodic repositioning needed. It also cost about twice as much as this one. So bottom line, this product has great performance and a great price. I could not be happier.

I was looking into buying a portable LCD TV to watch over-the-air broadcasts. These TVs run around $100-$120. And then it hit me: Get a USB TV tuner for my laptop! It's already portable, with a much larger screen and better sound than a bargain portable TV. And so I started researching...

I originally decided on another full-featured tuner that was around $90 and ordered it online for in-store pickup. When I got to the store I decided to see what else was on the shelves and discovered the Diamond TV Wonder 750U. It has/does everything that the one I'd ordered does - for half the price! (In fact, the Diamond does more, as it can pick up non-US signals, which may be handy when I travel overseas.) After careful deliberation I couldn't find any downside to choosing the less-expensive Diamond, so I went with that. And I'm very glad I did.

Setup was a snap. Within 10 minutes I was sitting on my patio watching the Chargers play the Bears in HD on CBS. Later I'm going to hook up my VCR and begin transfering my VHS home videos to digital files. I don't have a DVR in my cable box, but with my laptop now I can record, rewind, and fastforward. Add in the FM receiver (also with DVR - DAR? - capabilities) and my laptop is now a full-featured airwave-driven portable media center. Awesome!

[As you can see, I did not buy this product on Amazon.com, but I figure many people will be researching and buying it here, so I thought my experience might help.]

Works great with an HD antenna. BEWARE: Just be aware that if you delete a file from the Diamond software, it disappears forever. But, if you go to the folder that has the file and delete it from there, it goes to the recycle bin instead and you might be able to retrieve it if your recycle bin is set to hold large files [you can set limits by right clicking over the bin and choosing "Properties."