Dell XPS 410: Core 2 Duo for the Masses
by Jarred Walton on September 18, 2006 12:20 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Multimedia Capabilities
One final item to talk about is the included TV tuner. The card is manufactured by Lumanate, Inc., and it includes a couple of Micronas chips as well as two NEC chips on the PCB. Windows Device Manager lists the dual TV tuner as Angel II MPEG. The card is naturally fully compatible with Windows Media Center Edition 2005. First, here's a shot of the card itself.
We did not try to test the TV tuner with other HTPC applications, but we did conduct some basic quality testing using the standard Windows MCE interface. Once MCE was set up for our location, watching and recording channels was extremely easy. In terms of quality, the picture looks good and subjectively compares to most other dual analog TV tuners. Without extensive testing time with additional cards, we can't say for certain whether it is equal to, better than, or not as good as other TV tuners we have reviewed. We would suspect it has a slightly lower quality image than the top analog tuners, but even the best analog signal pales in comparison to your standard HDTV signals. We captured a few sample videos to demonstrate the quality, seen below.
Note that deinterlacing is handled in part by the software during playback, so the output of Windows Media Center looks slightly different than what you might see in other media players. We chose to capture the unprocessed videos at their native resolution using Windows Media Player 10. You can spot some interlacing artifacts because of our capture methodology.
If you are looking for the absolute best quality analog tuner on the market, you'll probably want to do more research. Of course, if you are purchasing the XPS 410, you don't really get a choice about what TV tuner you want included. You can either get the dual-TV tuner or the single channel tuner, but both offer similar quality. In terms of out-of-the-box experience, the TV tuner left little to be desired. It works, the image quality looks about as good as most other analog TV tuners we have tested, and the Windows MCE interface is very easy to use.
One final item to talk about is the included TV tuner. The card is manufactured by Lumanate, Inc., and it includes a couple of Micronas chips as well as two NEC chips on the PCB. Windows Device Manager lists the dual TV tuner as Angel II MPEG. The card is naturally fully compatible with Windows Media Center Edition 2005. First, here's a shot of the card itself.
 |
| Click to enlarge |
We did not try to test the TV tuner with other HTPC applications, but we did conduct some basic quality testing using the standard Windows MCE interface. Once MCE was set up for our location, watching and recording channels was extremely easy. In terms of quality, the picture looks good and subjectively compares to most other dual analog TV tuners. Without extensive testing time with additional cards, we can't say for certain whether it is equal to, better than, or not as good as other TV tuners we have reviewed. We would suspect it has a slightly lower quality image than the top analog tuners, but even the best analog signal pales in comparison to your standard HDTV signals. We captured a few sample videos to demonstrate the quality, seen below.
 |
 |
 |
| Click to enlarge |
Note that deinterlacing is handled in part by the software during playback, so the output of Windows Media Center looks slightly different than what you might see in other media players. We chose to capture the unprocessed videos at their native resolution using Windows Media Player 10. You can spot some interlacing artifacts because of our capture methodology.
If you are looking for the absolute best quality analog tuner on the market, you'll probably want to do more research. Of course, if you are purchasing the XPS 410, you don't really get a choice about what TV tuner you want included. You can either get the dual-TV tuner or the single channel tuner, but both offer similar quality. In terms of out-of-the-box experience, the TV tuner left little to be desired. It works, the image quality looks about as good as most other analog TV tuners we have tested, and the Windows MCE interface is very easy to use.
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JarredWalton - Monday, September 18, 2006 - link
The real problem is that most of the time the speech recognition is so accurate that I don't properly read the words and make sure DNS put what I intended. For example, in that above post, "for a look" should have been "where I look".Part of the solution is to learn to dictate very clearly and make sure you enunciate all of the words properly. Even with precise dictation, however, speech recognition is still going to make some mistakes. 95% accuracy is actually quite good, and I have learned to live within the limitations of the software.
yyrkoon - Tuesday, September 19, 2006 - link
sounds like you ned to incorporate a spell checker into your list of editing utilities :Pyyrkoon - Tuesday, September 19, 2006 - link
actually, I meant grammar utility, dahmed fingers . . .JarredWalton - Tuesday, September 19, 2006 - link
Grammar checking utilities are notoriously bad. Half of the "errors" that they highlight are correct, but then they still miss a bunch of things that are incorrect. The best solution is just to proofread really thoroughly, but stuff still slips through at times.mino - Monday, September 18, 2006 - link
I am sure amy would reallly appreciate to make bigger tests such as printed magizines do.The most writing should be on the ergonomics, case design, cooling, support, warranty and so on.
While providing only some reference numbers of the performance of the systems averyone to each other with 2 your systems(benchmarked more thoroughly) as a reference for comparison (i.e. Intel,AMD one).
Also some DIY system comparison won't hurt, It was a long time real system-to-system tests were done.
This way IMHO even some synergies would show up which remain normally undetectable if only-component specific tests are done.
Such test should also hugely go for real-life situations with tons of active background stuff like Google Desktop Search, radio, SETi.. running
mino - Monday, September 18, 2006 - link
amy == many ;)mino - Monday, September 18, 2006 - link
And one special thing:PLEASE do som HDD tests with HUGELY fragmented - this is the real situation, yet pretty much not tested at all...
i.e.: 500k scattered files on an 250G drive, half ogf it fragmented, then try moving copying some big file within such a drive.
That's the real wold stress test many drive have to endure daily... 1MBps is no exception then!
JarredWalton - Monday, September 18, 2006 - link
Windows Media Center by default is set to the fragment your hard drive during the night in order to keep performance optimized. If we were trying to do stress testing of hard drives to make them fail, I suppose such tests might be useful, but ideally we don't want to test performance in artificially handicapped situations.As far as printed magazines, this review was over a thousand words in length. I can pretty much guarantee that no print magazine is going to publish a review that long about any computer system... at least not unless they get some massive advertising money from the manufacturer first.
mino - Tuesday, September 19, 2006 - link
I reffered to print guys just because the TYPE of the review I mentioned reminded me their ways.Not trying to compare.. they would get trashed most likely:)
That MCE thingie sounds nice. However most PC are OFF at night and it is not particularly welcome to have a system run defragment during my work on it.
Even so, I have observed that even with a huge amount of no-fragmented files scattered around the drive behaves the way as the fragmented one.
The reason I requested such tests was not to make the drives fail(hell they shouldn't) but to a hve a comparison how different ones compare in such a situation.
This is a common situation an an heavily run WS or light file-server after a year or so of running.
mino - Tuesday, September 19, 2006 - link
Almost forget. I am sure many guys appreciate you comming here to reply to our comments.Thanks for that.