There's nothing new about installing an HDTV receiver on your PC—plenty of PCI cards and USB devices will do the trick—but rarely have I seen a setup as simple (or as cheap) as Plextor's $99 mini HD receiver. Roughly the size of a USB thumbdrive, the PX-HDTV500U plugs right into your system's USB 2.0 port. Attach the included over-the-air antenna, and you'll be watching (and recording) high-def programming on your PC within minutes.

The Plextor receiver kit comes with the compact, USB-equipped receiver module, a flat antenna (roughly the size of a paperback book), a coaxial cable, a remote control and HD tuner software for your PC (no Mac support, unfortunately). Setup was a piece of cake—I just installed the software, plugged the receiver into my laptop's USB port, and attached the antenna, which I placed on the top shelf of my cubicle (the picture was pretty choppy when the antenna was right next to my laptop, as pictured above).

Once I fired up the bundled software, my system scanned the airwaves for channels; within a few minutes, I'd locked on to about seven—not bad, considering that the antenna was inside my Manhattan office, rather than outside (you can also attach rabbit ears or even a rooftop antenna). After tinkering with the antenna a bit to get a decent signal, I was rewarded with crystal-clear HD images of Chuck Scarborough on NewsChannel 4. The picture was impressively smooth, although when I tried different positions with the antenna, the image got choppier and choppier—again, not surprising given that I was using the antenna indoors.

Want to record some shows? The PX-HDTV500U doubles as a DVR; just scan the electronic programming guide (you can download up to 14 days of data over the Web) and select the shows you want to record (the DVR interface isn't nearly as intuitive as, say, the TiVo UI, but it does the trick). Keep an eye on your disk space, though; I recorded about five minutes of HD programming and ended up with a 250MB MPEG4 file.

All good stuff, but keep in mind that you'll need some substantial horsepower to watch HD with the PX-HDTV500U in all its glory-to be exact, you'll need at least a 3Ghz Pentium 4 processor, 512MB of RAM, and 128MB of video memory. If you're fine with standard-def pictures, a 1Ghz Pentium 3 with 256MB of RAM will do.

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Product page [Plextor]