Rating: 8/10
Pinnacle has been a force of nature in the video capture market for some considerable time, and they've carved a fine reputation in both the home and semi-professional sectors. Their hardware is usually characterised by being slightly expensive, but softening that blow with a noticeably higher quality build or specification.
The PCTV USB Stick flouts Pinnacle's usually model by being very reasonably priced, but still well built and specified. At under £50 it's capable of bringing ground-based digital TV (DVB-T) to any 1GHz or faster PC that has a USB 2.0 port. It doesn't do analogue, but given a few years from now that won't matter much.
Included in the plastic vacuum-formed shell is the decoder, a mini antenna, a mini remote control, software and a short manual. Of these items the most useless is the antenna with a magnetic foot, as using it I wasn't able to pick up any signals whatsoever. The gizmo itself is well made, as is the cute remote, although like many USB dongle designs they it seems they never thought about where you might store the USB blade cover when it's in use. That annoyance aside, the stick is finished to a high degree and made to handle some, if not a massive amount of, abuse.
I expected the hardware to work well, and it does, given a decent signal. But the surprise of this package is the Pinnacle TVCenter application, which is quite simply gorgeous. Having seen and used numerous flavours of rubbish purporting to be capture applications recently it was blast of fresh air to find a tool that worked well and looked fantastic. The interface is very much in the Mac OSX style of look and feel, and this coupled with the unfussy interface helps make it a complete joy to use.
My only disappointment was that the programme scheduling mechanism relies on an external service, which requires a subscription. Quite why they did this, as the digital streams for DVB-T contain programming for the hours ahead, seems bizarre, but they did.
They also seem to be stuck in a timewarp where conventional Teletext is available on DVB-T transmissions. In general it isn't, and it's never likely to be, as it's been replaced with a totally new digital Teletext. This is an issue that all DVB-T hardware/software has, so it's unfair to pin it in Pinnacle entirely.
If you want DVB-T decoder that's easy to deploy and use, then you can do much worse than this one and very little better.
For more information, visit Micromart.co.uk