A flawed concept rescued by perservering customer support
Pros:
A great concept, versatile in handling different TV systems. Hard working customer support
Cons:
Poor packaging, inconsistent instructions, no troubleshooting for the user.
The Bottom Line:
My experience cannot be normal. However I still cannot bring myself to recommend this device. It has cost me a lot of time and frustration.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
I bought this internal PCI card TV tuner for my Mac G4 for the simple reason that it would allow me to record and archive my NTSC and PAL videos as well as watch either PAL or NTSC TV programs. With a collection of videos in both formats, this seemed to be the simplest solution.
I bought the card without a remote even though the company later admitted thst their packaging was confusing. If you want a remote, make sure you pick up the right box!
Installing the card was fine and I soon hooked up my NTSC VCR and started the software. This is where things got confusing as there were two programs available six months ago and my box had an outdated version of the older program. So I downloaded the new program only to find that my serial number (not very legible anyway) wouldn't work. This precipitated my first call to customer service and they sent me a new serial number password combination.
I started to record a few videos, basically compressing the signal to a Quicktime movie format. Then the card disappeared from the system profile. Customer service suggested I do a PRAM reset and this worked once, then the 250 Gig hard drive started to give problems. Another PRAM reset and I lost the card altogether. I then had to erase the hard drive and start again.
I second card was sent but it didn't work. The third card also didn't work and then it was guessed that it was my computer, not the card. So I was sent a diagnostics program which was run and returned. Various experiments were tried, all to no avail until I was finally asked to check a library file that should have been loaded by their software. It wasn't there!
So now, 6 months later (and I have been traveling so this could have been condensed down to about 2 months) I have a working Alchemy card.
Next time I would buy a free standing firewire or USB 2.0 box, assuming, of course that similar problems would not apply.
Update, March 31 2005
The card appears to have failed. It's still under warranty so I will have to return it. I'm taking a star off the rating (3 down to 2).
